Yu(u)ri on Thin Ice
by Freemont23
Summary: Due to an injury, Yuri Plisetsky never completed his first and to date only senior season. Without him to compete against, Yuuri Katsuki won his first gold medal at the Grand Prix Finals. Years later, Yuuri is retired, engaged, happily trailing after his fiancé Viktor, and unsure of what his life should be off the ice. Then, he found Yuri Plisetsky.
1. Chapter 1 - History Repeater

**Author's Note: This story is a collaboration between me and Enigmatic Insignia.**

 **~enigmaticinsignia**

Despite retiring from the world of figure skating, Yuuri Katsuki found that he still couldn't get enough of the rink. Luckily for him, his fiancé Viktor had continued his career as a skating coach, which in turn allowed Yuuri plenty of opportunities to get back on the ice. Viktor's latest student, Otabek Altin, whom they had each competed against on more than one occasion, was more than happy to share the ice when Yuuri needed to 'get his fix', as he put it; as if it were some kind of a drug addiction. It was.

Looking out over the crowd from his spot above the bleachers, Yuuri breathed in the cold air and let out a misty breath with satisfaction. Normally on a late afternoon, the ice would be empty and Otabek would be practicing his routine, but today was the rink's free skate day and in turn one of the days that Viktor and Otabek used for his exercise regimen. No doubt, they were out jogging or doing various stretches to keep Otabek limber and in top form, thereby leaving Yuuri in the company of the couple dozen strangers frequenting a public skate on a Saturday Afternoon in Detroit.

With his skates draped over his shoulder and his hands in his pockets, Yuuri further descended the staircase leading down to the ice. He smiled softly to himself at the picture ahead of him, looking much like any other amateur skater who'd come for a few laps. The shouts of children and adults alike echoed through the space as the patrons skated around and around the outer edge of the ice. In the midst of the noise and familiar, staggered scratches of blades clashing with the surface, there was no reason for Yuuri to focus on one particular little girl marching on the other side of the rink.

"Dyadya Yura! Dyadya Yura!" a young girl's voice, which was, logically enough, attached to a young girl, called over from her perch at the wall. With a quick push and a stomp forward, she marched clumsily on her skates over to a blonde boy in a partial ponytail and faded snow-leopard print hoodie.

Rather than let her move too far away from the wall, Yuri weaved through the crowd, towards her. He slowed himself with a bend and pivot to one knee until he was in reach. "Yes. I exist. What the hell's it matter?"

At the same instance as he'd uttered the word hell, a woman hardly a few years older than Yuri leaned over the railing. "Yura! Language" Her eyes narrowed with the instinctive flash of an upcoming lecture. She wrapped an arm around the older child standing at her side—a preteen boy in headphones and a purple beanie who was staring at his phone in disinterest.

The little girl clung to Yuri's leg, burrowing her face behind him. He readjusted his weight distribution without calling attention to the disruption to his glide courtesy of a giddy child in a fluffy, white Hello Kitty hat weighting down his left leg. Yuri pivoted partway, turning so that he was now skating backwards and facing the increasingly offended woman through his own apathetic stare. "What? I used English."

The woman cupped a hand to the side of her mouth, the closest she could get to mimicking a megaphone in public. "I mean, watch your mouth!"

"Then give me a blin mirror!" he shouted back, at least partially censoring himself, albeit with all the subtlety of an iceberg in the Sahara, by switching the intended curse word with the similar-sounding word for a crepe.

The little girl pushed off of Yuri's leg with surprise. She skidded back across the ice, her eyes and mouth agape with astonishment. "Pancakes can be mirrors? How? Can they be strawed-berries pancakes?"

Rather than let her drift in the sea of random recreational skaters, Yuri slowed his glide, back to the young girls' side with an unamused."No. Arms up, don't watch the ice." He reached over her shoulder to physically adjust her stance. "Here. Don't move if you're not falling. Just feet. Only feet."

Following his instructions at least technically, the little girl tilted her head back, gazing straight up at Yuri through glimmers of amusement. "But pancakes aren't shiny!"

As they again passed the spot at the side of the rink where the rest of their group was standing by, the girl's mother raised both of her hands and clapped as loudly as possible. "Yay, Ninochka! That's perfect! All the gold stars!"

The louder she got, the more the boy at her side obscured his face behind his phone before, eventually, marching away from the bleachers entirely. "Whatever. I've got to pee."

It wasn't until Yuri and the girl had already skated past them that the woman fully registered what the boy had said. She blinked to attention and reached for his shoulder. "You, Misha, wait! Or, not." Her flailing did nothing. By then, the boy was already beyond reach, his fingers still clacking away as he strode away. The woman cupped both hands over her mouth and raised her voice all the more in exasperation. "Watch out for strangers!"

A couple of glides later, at the moment just before Yuri could have found himself lost in the shuffle of the doldrums that were the outer edge of a crowded skating rink, the little girl tilted back even further. Her feet fell back, placing herself nearly in parallel with Yuri's legs, so she could look at him directly from below with the sort of sugary sweetness that would melt the hearts of many an adult. "Dyadya Yura?"

Yuri, naturally, didn't seem affected at all. "No."

"But I didn't ask anything! Meanie!" she pouted.

"Yeah. Your point?"

"Can you really do a twirly jump? Mamachka said you do the whirly birds."

While speaking English in daily conversation hadn't been that much of a stretch, Yuri was considerably less fluent in little girl. All he could do was guess what the hell that was supposed to mean. "What, an axel?"

The girl, meanwhile, had no idea what that meant, and whined back under the assumption it was something else. "No, the spinny jumps! Do a spinny jump!"

With the other child now gone, but presumably not off in a ditch somewhere, the girls' mother opened the gate to join them. She shook her head back, her voice softening in anticipation of the blowback that always came from telling a kid no. "Oh, Ninochka, not here, it's not safe. There're too many people." At the tail end of this sentence, she looked away from her daughter, back up to Yuri, creases of a frown and pity invading her expression in a silent apology.

The girl either didn't pick up on this or hadn't cared to listen in favor of pleading more loudly. "Pretty please!"

It was bad enough, the woman thought, that her Ninochka had insisted on going skating with "Uncle Yura" in the first place. The types of memories it called to the forefront were bad enough for her, and she'd had so little contact with what had happened in the aftermath. If it was truly as hard for Yuri to be here as she imagined, her daughter might as well have been throwing a man covered in open wounds into a salt mine.

The woman held her hands at the ready to cover her daughter's ears, anticipating another shout, a glare—furious, indignant retaliation. Instead, Yuri simply nudged the girl forward into her mother's arms, pivoted, and answered into the open air. "Not at the center."

Yuri never stopped to see the flush of concern it brought to the woman, the color siphoned straight out of her. "You really don't have to."

"What, you want her to think you're a liar? Give her three years, she'll know on her own!" Yuri raised his chin and his voice, speaking up so his words would still carry behind him while he glided to interior of the rink. "Eyes up, Ninochka. You fall on baby steps, I'll break what you don't."

"Yura! Come back, it's ok, you really don't have to!" she tried to yell, not that it did anything. No matter how many times she shouted "Yura!" at his back, it was just another voice in an overcrowded free skate.

The sheer sound of other people rushing in circles by assured Yuri no one else was in the way. Preliminaries, Grand Prix, back in Moscow, or St. Petersburg, or in the middle of nowhere on another continent, any ice on stable ground could work the same. It always had been. The faint pop radio they had on in the background, some boy band nonsense he'd never heard in his life, was overtaken by the sheer volume of memories he'd never made.

"Feh. Like I can't. Like I literally f—king couldn't," he muttered under his breath. Then, he opened his eyes to a world only inside his head.

No matter how long it took him to get back here, or what idiots who couldn't even tumble right when they fell cluttered the surface, that call to move forward was the deepest, most intense seduction Yuri had ever known. Most of the time, it was all he could do to pretend he'd stopped noticing. Now, in this moment, he let it pull him, if only to make a small child shut up. Engrossed in that call, lost amongst the faces of strangers, Yuri had no way of spotting Yuuri Katsuki sitting on the bleachers not more than twenty feet away.

Yuuri's head dangled down, focused, at least momentarily, on the simple act of untying and removing his shoes. He set the first discarded sneaker at his side, his hand reaching for his skate to replace it, only to be distracted from a gasp in the crowd.

"Mamachka, mamachka, look! He can fly!" A young girl in a white cat-eared hat pointed her matching mittens towards center ice. Softly, beneath him, a few other voices had gasped in awe or shock.

Curious as to what, exactly, the crowd could be observing, Yuuri stood to face the ice. His eyes drifted naturally upwards to the young man skating in the center. As the figure moved along the ice, Yuuri could tell that he was completely focused and absorbed in his actions. It was the look in his eyes—a look that Yuuri had seen countless times. It was the look every dedicated skater had when they practiced a routine or performed for the crowd.

At first, he had started with a lower difficulty combination, moving from a double axel into a toe loop with what Yuuri could only peg as a surreal amount of grace amidst the previously clamoring, chattering crowd that had dulled their roars to mere whispers. Then, as he circled back through a brief serpentine to their starting point, it seemed the figure had found a rhythm, albeit it one that bore no resemblance to the music crackling in the background. Hardly a minute later, he had pulled from a spin, into a combination of a slightly-underrated attempt at a quadruple lutz, to a surprisingly stable triple salchow and onwards. The movements shook at points, over-rotated or under-rotated, but the strain was masked at least in part by the pure passion behind it.

Transfixed by the sheer brazenness it took to try this in such a cluttered space, Yuuri drew closer, directly up to the ledge of the rink. If he didn't know any better he would have guessed it was Yuri Plisetsky, but no one had heard from him in years, not since he was injured days after placing first in the Rostelecom Cup. Nonetheless, the grace of each movement was just so much like Yuri's style, it plagued Yuuri with its familiarity, like a ghost amongst the living.

Reaching into his pocket, Yuuri grabbed his phone and quickly began to take a video. If anyone could identify who this kid was, it was Viktor. While it was clear that the skater was a bit rusty, if the lack of a coach in sight was indeed indicative of him guiding himself through this makeshift routine, he at the very least had raw, natural talent.

Still in awe of what was happening in front of her, the young girl raised her arms, waving them up and down as if she was trying to imitate the figure at the center. "Do a whirly bird! A whirly bird!" In the girl's excited flailing, she slipped off the blade. Her knees buckled, and she started to topple forward.

"Ninochka, careful!" the girl's mother scrambled to wrap her arms around her in an attempt to block her fall, only to end up stumbling, too.

At the same time, the figure at the center launched out of the sit spin he had fallen into, interrupting the flow in favor of rushing to the girl's aid. "At least fall sideways, Nino-durochka!" he snapped.

While Yuuri wasn't fluent in the language by any means, he knew enough Russian to realize what the skater had said. He had, in essence, exchanged the usual ending you'd use to affectionally address a little girl named Nina and had, in addition, called her little and stupid.

"Don't call a child durochka!" the girl's mother argued back, which, unsurprisingly if Yuuri's instincts were right, didn't have an impact on the boy at all, who simply rolled his eyes to the scolding.

"She says what she sees, so will I."

Ending the video recording, Yuuri put his phone away before walking around the edge of the rink. The closer he drew to the small family group, the more he was convinced that the resemblance just couldn't be a coincidence.

Stopping at the gate, Yuuri placed a hand on the rail and the other to the side of his mouth and called at the top of his lungs. "Yuri Plisetsky!"

The attention of a clumsy child had been distraction enough that, it wasn't until that exact moment that he heard his name called from the sidelines that Yuri Plisetsky finally spotted Yuuri Katsuki. For a single, flashing moment, their eyes locked. Then, he turned away.

Nina's mother, however, had flipped her head over her shoulder the instant that Yuuri called out Yuri's name. "Ой, uh, hello?" She blinked a few times, seemingly stunned that someone was there in the first place. "Do you know him? Wait, no, that's dumb. You said his name, of course you know him, then…"

Suddenly noticing the woman he had up to then disregarded, Yuuri turned his attention toward her instead. He nodded back at her enthusiastically. "Yes! We skated together a few years ago but I haven't seen or heard from him since."

Yuri, despite having seen Yuuri standing at the edge of the rink next to someone that he was obviously acquainted with, continued to ignore his presence. Instead, he stared at the many, etched lines of the blades that had passed over the rink today, and muttered under his breath. "Yetitskaya sila."

As if it was a summoning spell for a tiny child to interrupt what he meant to be dwelling on, Nina chirped up again. "You know what? I'm gonna be a bird, too. I'm a pen-wing!" She raised both of her arms overhead in victory—or at least, she had tried to, before Yuri pushed them back down.

"Good. Penguins don't fly."

"No! Pen-wings have wings! Wings fly! Why can't they fly?"

"Because they're lazy and nature hates their useless, dumb flipper arms. You're a penguin, now. Go."

In the same second that Yuri had bent over to nudge Nina through a cleared path away from the center, Yuri was, by natural extension, facing directly towards Nina's mother. She, having noticed this, waved an arm over her head to flag his attention. "Yura! This way! Don't you want to say hi to your friend?"

Without a second's worth of hesitation, he answered, the only way he honestly could have—by snapping. "Nyet!"

Frowning, Yuuri released a small sigh. After all these years, Yuri Plisetsky had finally resurfaced, but he clearly wanted nothing to do with him.

Katya's body language curled with the inevitable, oncoming apology. "I'm sorry, whatev—"

Whatever the woman had been about to say, it was abruptly cut off by Yuri slamming his foot, blade and all, into the guard wall. He reached over the side of the ledge, stabilizing himself with the bottoms of his palms so he could press himself against the wall and straight into Yuuri's face.

Subconsciously taking a step back in a defensive gesture, Yuuri held Yuri's gaze, in spite of that meaning he was meeting a glare that could have turned Medusa to stone right back while Yuri snapped at him. "Why the literal f—k are you still standing here? Go! Away! If I suggest, to the puddle rink in hell!"

For a moment, Yuuri hesitated, unsure what he could say, if anything. Yuri wasn't someone that you talked to like a long-lost friend. He was a raging ball of fire who burned everything he touched. Sometimes he raged out of control and other times, he burned dim. Yuuri had a feeling that he was only raging now to hide how dim his flame had become over the last few years. No one really knew why Yuri had stopped competing, but Yuuri suspected that it wasn't anything good.

When Yuuri refused to move or speak, lost in thought, it only gave Yuri the fuel to snap at him more. "Let me put this so even your empty pig brain can understand. Whatever spy detective crap you paid off to stalk me out of some sanctimonious bullshit need to feel like a "good guy", you should've spent looking for your balls!"

The sheer volume and contents of the yell made Nina's mother move aside, and press both of her hands over Nina's ears. "Ninochka, let's go get ice cream and your brother. Uncle Yura has a… a, something to talk about" She slid her grip further down to her hold her daughter by the arm and guide Nina towards the next exit door.

Nina turned up the wattage on her pouting from mild disappointment over penguins to the verge of full on sobbing. "Why? I wanna stay."

"He needs his privacy, Ninochka. We need to go."

"But why?"

Ignoring the commotion of the little girl being lead out to the mats, at the end of it all, the one thing Yuuri could think of to say to the living mystery that had appeared before his eyes was one, simple truth. "Viktor's been worried about you."

There was no telling how Yuri would react to the statement, but it was true. Viktor did worry about Yuri and what had happened to the young protégé. Over the years, he and Yuuri had both tried reaching out to Yuri via phone, letters or email – they'd never received any replies. Even their wedding invitation had been sent back, but Yuuri realized now that it was likely that they had a very old, no longer valid address for Yuri, considering he was in Detroit, Michigan instead of St. Petersburg.

Yuri's foot dropped, planted stagnantly behind the rest of him. For a brief reprieve of a second, he silenced, too. Then, Yuri shook his head, twitching the thought away.

"Viktor. Feh," His eyes shifted aside, briefly, structuring the thought and also, in implication, conveying that he didn't think Yuuri was even worth watching, anymore. "It's all I remember from you. Woof woof woof, Viktor, Viktor, Viktor. Parading like you're him when all you are's his obedient little bitch."

Lacking even the most basic sense of understanding for the context that they were currently in, Yuri stretched up, planting one of his knees directly on top of the ledge between the bleachers and the rink. He swung his other leg there as well, so that he was now crouching atop the barrier. He yanked Yuuri forward by the collar of his jacket, towards himself. It was unexpected enough that Yuuri ended up falling straight into it, off balance and open for the verbal onslaught. In a sense, if Yuri was a ball of fire waiting to rage, then, against his will, Yuuri had just neatly packaged himself as kindling.

"What did you think this would do, huh, asshole? Seeing me? That I'd be another fake mark of success to fetch for precious master Viktor? 'Look at me, Vik-chan, I found the poor fairy for you after I finished licking your shoe. Vik-chan, I'll put my head up your ass for you if you're into that. I can fit, I promise. I don't even need to take out my spine to fit the rest of me, too, I never had one'!" Yuri shouted increasingly louder, his fury and overblown mockery building to a crescendo. He shoved Yuuri backwards by his jacket, deeper into the area behind the rink, and vaulted the rest of the way over the rail, landing cleanly on the foam mats. With the addition of Yuri's skates to his height, they were almost exactly at eye level. "Whatever you think Viktor thinks is nothing. What, in that air pocket where your head would be if it wasn't up his ass, would you get from standing here, wasting your time with my spit in your face? That pat on the head from him? Relief? To watch and think, 'yeah, sure, I'm a talking doormat with a food fetish, but, at least I'm not that guy?'"

At first, Yuuri let Yuri pour his heart out onto the rink's padded floor. It seemed to him that with no other outlet or target, Yuri was unleashing what was likely years of pent up fury, anger, frustration and sorrow on the first target he could find. The thing was, Yuuri was far from the pushover he'd once been. He didn't blink, or quiver, or show any signs of cracking—a fact which seemed to only make Yuri all the more venomous.

Yuri poked at the center of Yuuri's head and jabbed there repeatedly, each one longer than the last, as if marking the spot he intended to drill into Yuuri's skull. "As if gold and titles change souls, loser! Even now, you want to shrink, tail between your legs, put the cow in coward. You doubt, and snivel, because even with your peanut pig brain, you know; no title or record or codependent relationship can make you alone anything but the pathetic, anxious sentient sack of shit you were. That was my medal, little bitch!"

There it was, thought Yuuri, the moment it slipped out—the reason why he was the target.

As rival skaters, there had always been the unspoken challenges between Yuuri and Yuri; who would get Viktor as their coach, who would get the better routine, who would win the Grand Prix. Yuuri had always viewed the rivalry as healthy, as a way for them both to reach for higher goals and to push themselves farther. It seemed now that perhaps Yuri hadn't felt the same, or at least, didn't anymore. If Yuri had competed in the Grand Prix Finals as originally planned, there was no doubt in Yuuri's mind that Yuri would have given him a run for his money—but the show down they had been building up to had never happened, and it seemed that the other Yuri, the little Russian Punk, was clearly hung up on the rematch that had never been.

Once he'd fallen to the realizations of what he had said, Yuri tried to override his own last words, snapping over himself. "Go choke on his d—k. Da yebal ya!" Literally speaking, he'd said that he didn't care. Literally, the translation was closer to saying that he fucked something.

Lost in a huff, Yuri took a step past Yuuri and reached down, untying the laces of the crummy, overused skates with the rink's rental number's sticker peeling off the back. Dropping his gaze to Yuri's feet, Yuuri couldn't help but notice the crackled leather and fading logo, identical to every other pair still on the ice. That, more than anything Yuri could have said or screamed or spit at him, made it evident that whatever had happened to the Russian punk these last few years, it had left him for the worse.

There were things that Yuuri wanted to say in defense of himself and of Viktor, but he knew that it was useless to. Yuri hadn't said those things to start an argument, he'd said them to push Yuuri away. Arguing now would only give him what he was looking for. Instead, if only for the sake of what he thought Viktor would want him to do, Yuuri kept on a brave face and offered something else.

"We come here almost every day, Viktor and I. Usually we have the rink to ourselves for training, but there are off days, of course." Turning to look out at the ice, Yuuri let his words drift between them. "I didn't come here looking for you, Yuri. I can here to skate in circles and enjoy the ice, just like you and your family. This was a chance encounter, but in the future, it doesn't have to be." Yuuri took a few steps forward, away from the rink. He turned his head over his shoulder for one last look back at someone who, moments ago, he might have mistakenly identified as a former friend. "Just think about it. For Viktor."

"Thanks for warning me, asshole. Of course it's to yourselves. Anyone else spots you. You'd be arrested for exposure," Yuri interjected without a second thought, or, for that matter, likely also without a first.

As Yuri walked away in nothing but his socks and irritation, he added one last snap, a symbolic match to the bridge Yuuri had offered to rebuild. "I'll think about my foot in your face." Then, to ensure he had the last word, Yuri stomped away.

With his bag of skates at his side, still sealed, Yuuri trudged back towards the front entrance. The urge to glide and enjoy the frost was gone. Now, Yuuri just wanted to have his fiancé hold him close and tell him how much he loved him. Still, it wasn't over yet. For Viktor's sake, there was something else Yuuri at least had to try.

At the door, Yuuri caught sight of the woman he'd briefly spoken to before the verbal onslaught, and the little girl Yuri had been skating with, just a few paces from the concession stand. The little girl was holding an ice cream, her meltdown having been prevented with the newfound addition of rainbow sprinkles, while her mother was tapping away anxiously at her cell phone.

Stopping a few feet from the mother-daughter pair, Yuuri offered a small smile and an extended hand in greeting to them both. "I apologize for not introducing myself before, I'm Yuuri Katsuki. I used to train and skate with Yuri."

The woman raised her head to him with a soft, reassuring smile that had clearly already been there moments ago. The one sign of her surprise was the sudden flash of recognition in her eyes. "A, so, that was you!" She snapped her fingers in realization, only to lower the hand back to her pocket in a nervous fidget. Her smile faltered accordingly, the tug of an apology pulling at her. "He's mentioned you, before. Though. Not on purpose, exactly. He, uh, yelled at you on his phone a lot, as I recall. Are you alright? He's. Well. I'm sure you know how, intense, he tends to be… My name's Katya Yolkin. Yuri's my cousin. "

Having, at this point, finally noticed the hand being extended to her, Katya reached out to take it. She shook it slowly, bracing to utter a sorry that never formed due to another interruption. The little girl at Katya's side raised her hand and her slightly ice-cream-coated chin to wave and smile at him. "Hi, Yuri! I'm Nina! I'm four! I skated, too!"

Katya looked back from Yuuri down to her daughter, her own smile softening from apologetic to calming. "And you did a good job, too, Ninochka. Now, use your napkin and shake his hand."

"Why not hugs? Does he like hugs?"

"Why don't you ask him?"

Nina bobbed upright, her head tilting back to look from her mom back over to Yuuri. She pushed her hat away from her face, so she could stare at him away from the tufts of white fur. "Do you like hugs?"

Feeling that there was essentially no other answer worth giving, Yuuri couldn't help but agree. "Of course. I love hugs."

Satisfied, Nina flung out her left arm. She snuggled into Yuuri with the hand that wasn't holding her ice cream. Her hand print left a small, white smudge on the back of his jacket, not that she'd noticed. She was too busy grinning proudly at her job well done. "You're welcome!"

With the hugs and hellos properly attended to, Nina returned to her ice cream, and Yuuri to his wallet. He pulled out a business card from the back pocket and offered it to Kayta. "I know he probably won't want it, but just in case he'd reach out."

For a moment, Katya hesitated, letting her finger linger against the edge of Yuuri's card. She looked down, set the card away, and took out one of her own, polite if doubtful. "Well. To be honest. I'm not sure, if he'll be up to talking to you, or want to. But, whatever questions you or your fiancee have, I could try to answer. You just have to promise me it's in confidence. Friend of a friend, to friend of a friend, nothing public. Here, it's my number."

Honestly surprised, this time in the pleasant sense of it, Yuuri smiled down at ivory-and-saphire—colored, embellished, lacy business card for the apparent owner of something called "Something Blue Custom Accessories", one Yekaterina Yolkin. Already, he could feel the relief it might bring to Viktor to have this emanating off the card

"I have to warn you, my fiancé is going to be very happy to hear that I found Yuri, he's been pretty worried about him since he disappeared. So please, don't be surprised if he calls you immediately."

With more hesitance than she had planned to show, Katya's smile broadened and faltered all at once, already laughing from doubt. "Well, that makes two of us to worry, then, I suppose." At the end of their pleasantries, Katya offered Yuuri a smile and a wave in parting. Again, it was a soft, restrained expression, the sort that never traveled up to the person's eyes, but it was there in intention if not in reality. "Have a good evening, Yuuri. I'll be sure to charge my phone."

Meanwhile, back at the rink, the few recreational skaters turned accidental witnesses who had been observing from a distance still kept a curious eye on Yuri until he was obscured by the bleachers. Yuri passed by another wall in the oval, his strides rushed and elongated, determined to leave without running into Yuuri again.

During this very different but equally problematic form of a walk of shame, Yuri came to a stop when he noticed someone in the stands. The until-then-missing Misha hadn't left for as long as originally thought. He held his phone in front of his face, typing something. Yuri turned from his original spot to march up the bleachers, up towards and then directly behind him. On the screen, Yuri could spot the tell-tale thumbnail of a video file, implanted in an in-progress tweet for Misha's Twitter.

Misha didn't lift his head when he heard Yuri approaching. He spoke towards the phone, though he'd meant it towards Yuri if the judgmental befuddlement on his part was any indication. "Holy shit, dude. What was that?"

"Ten wasted minutes of my life."

Yuri reached over Misha's shoulder, grabbed the cell phone from his hand, and strode effortlessly backwards to the top of the bleachers with the phone held as far overhead as he could, preventing Misha from reaching it while he deleted the draft off Misha's Twitter.

"Hey, wait, that's my phone—" Misha snapped to attention with the phone gone. He tried to flail a hand towards it, but he only hit the air. "What the hell are you doing?" He struggled to reach up, yet, thanks to Yuri's creative stretching, Misha was left only with flails and shouting while Yuri deleted the day's photos.

"Preventing your future as a paparazzo. Record me, again, and wish you were watching your own funeral."

"What does that mean, you old brat?"

With the last picture trashed, Yuri chucked the phone over his shoulder. The phone bounced off the wall, then fell with a thud onto the foam mats. "Shut your damn mouth or I'll hot glue your lips closed for you."

For a second, Misha froze in disbelief. Then, with the sort of panic one could imagine if it had literally been his own heart languishing on the mats, Misha raced to retrieve it, leaving Yuri to descend the steps.

Yuri stepped along the intended seats of the bleachers, as if a rock skipping across a pond. He watched over the unsteady drifting and gliding of the sort of amateurs who'd come try ice skating of all things on an early August afternoon. Every time he meant to turn away, he didn't. Maybe, no matter where he was or what he was supposed to be doing, he never could.

Even from here, he could still feel the ice calling back for him.


	2. Chapter 2 - Thin Ice

****Author(s) Note: This is a collaboration between myself and Enigmatic Insignia****

* * *

Ch. 2 – Thin Ice

From the safety of his car, Yuuri, despite his better judgement, glanced back at the entrance of the rink. He looked down at his phone, only to go right back to staring across the pavement, his eyes stuck on the door with building trepidation that he might accidentally see Yuri and his family leaving. Before he could be accused of stalking, again, Yuuri willed himself to turn himself and the car key. He plugged in his Bluetooth and dialed Viktor on his way out of the lot.

In his mind, the moment froze, stuck in anticipation of his call bouncing off satellites, reaching out for the person he needed most. A single ring hung in the air, followed by the chime of his fiancé's voice through his earpiece. "Mushy-Mushy~!"

In spite of everything, Yuuri couldn't help but to smile at the mangled attempt at greeting him with the traditional, 'moshi-moshi'. "Hi Viktor. I need an emergency cuddle session. You're never going to believe who I just ran into."

"Oh, Yu-luchik, my precious snuggle bug, you know just what to say, now, and you don't ever even try, do you?" Viktor admired, the tone of his voice practically caressing Yuuri through the phone. Viktor had been coming up with a seemingly endless cycle of nicknames for him recently. Most of them, Yuuri didn't understand in the slightest, but he could tell that while quirky, the names were heartfelt and sweet.

At first, Yuuri was so distracted by the nonsense name that it took a moment for him to notice something else. His fiancé's chipper words of concern, a simple "where are you?", echoed off Yuuri's eardrum with a measured, static sort of tapping lurking in the background. It was, however muffled, the staggered, consistent rush of running water. Suddenly, two possibilities conjured in Yuuri's head. The first was that Viktor was already back at the apartment, cleaning off after the day's exercise routine. The second, increasingly more likely scenario was that Viktor was standing - most assuredly naked - in the communal showers at the gym, happily chatting on the phone while others tried to shower in peace.

"I'll send a car. I'd send myself, of course, but I need to shower before I shower hugs. Unless you'd like to combine them, that is? I'd be happy to share the water. Like old memories we would have had if you weren't so modest, then!" The clear excitement in Viktor's voice may have drawn at least one other person to peek out of their shower stall to see what the hell was going on. Viktor, of course, failed to notice.

"I'm at the rink sitting in my car, so, no need to send anyone, love. But thank you. A shower does sound nice, but," there was no way in the world that even his total beefcake of a fiancé could convince him to share a communal gym shower. "…I prefer our shower and towels over the gym's."

However minuscule a change it had been for Yuuri to shift from tense to nearly agreeing, it was enough encouragement for Viktor to continue. He pressed the side of his hand to his cheek, tapping it in contemplation. "I prefer you without the towels. Or at least with my monogramed one. It's nice having my name on you. Why do people use the ones with their own initials when they can have each other? Are they worried they'll forget their names?"

It was such a ridiculous thought that Yuuri couldn't help let his smile blossom under it. He, too, drew a stare from a stranger or two, hunched over at a stoplight with increasingly less reluctant sputters of amusement, but he found it surprisingly difficult to care.

Comfortable in the calmer kind of silence, Viktor turned away from his now currently unused shower stall. He leaned one of his shoulders against the side, getting strangely comfortable and conversational for someone stark naked in a public shower. "What was it that happened? Tell me. If you want me to languish your absence and bathe alone, I'll wrap up my phone to take with me, too." What Viktor meant, or so Yuuri assumed, was that Viktor would go find his waterproof phone case so he could keep talking in the shower.

As absurd as the idea should have sounded, Yuuri assumed it was already too late to be considerate of everyone around Viktor. With a light, exhausted sigh, he shook his head in disbelief at what he was about to say. "Yes, please. I'd like to keep talking. This kind of news can't wait."

The apparent time sensitivity was almost as foreboding as the initial build-up had been, so, Viktor turned towards the phone accordingly. "Yes, yes. Except, is this the can't wait that can it wait twenty seconds, or literally not wait? I can stay out here?"

"It can wait a minute, Vitya. Go get your case."

"Great. I'm keeping you, though. So my ear may ring like my finger."

"You don't have to. I can wait, really."

It only took Viktor a few moments to retrieve the proper case for his phone and soon enough Yuuri heard the 'click' of the shower door. "I'm back, with speakers! Whenever you'd like, I'm listening!" Viktor exclaimed, much too loud to be appropriate in any form of public, showers included. "Can you hear me, too? I'm here but can't hear."

Supposing it wouldn't help to hold it in any longer, Yuuri tried to drop the bomb. "I bumped into one of my old acquaintances today, at the rink…"

Assuming the context might be going in the logical direction, Viktor interjected over Yuuri. "O, yes, great. Was Phichit there?"

"No, a friend of yours..."

Viktor quieted somewhat at the clarification, giving a nod of understanding that Yuuri could imagine if not see. "Ah. No hamsters, then."

"Yeah. No hamsters." Yuuri considered, in his awkward pause, if there was a good way to explain something that ended so poorly. "I would like to say that he was happy to see me, but I don't think Yuri Plisetsky is capable of those kinds of pleasantries, even for you, Vitya."

There was an audible, palpable pause as Viktor froze, befuddled. He pressed a hand over his ear, rubbing at the water he expected must have been lodged in there. "Sorry, can you repeat that? For some reason, I thought you said Yuri Plisetsky?"

"I did. He was at the rink for the free skate. Honestly, he was the last person I'd ever thought to see skating in the center of the rink, but, he was."

Focusing on the road, Yuuri let Viktor process his words. There was no telling how he would react, considering the weight the mystery had on Viktor these past few years. From Viktor's contacts at the ISU, FFKK and the Figure Skating Federation of Saint Petersburg, no one had any answers more substantive than the same stock lines for the press. Yuri himself hadn't responded to their calls, emails, or even posted on Instagram. Yuuri recalled, specifically, a passing moment on the first day of the Rostelecom Cup two years prior. As Yuuri and Viktor walked to the front gate, past a cluster of teenage girls in black cat ears at a staged funeral for Yuri's career, Viktor had whispered under his breath that, for Yuri not to have come back, those girls may not have been wrong; Yuri may have genuinely been dying.

With that in mind, it may not have surprised Yuuri to hear Viktor practically chirp his double-check for affirmation. "Really? The free skate?" He questioned the idea as he was speaking it. " Ogogó, Yurio. Not dead and not in Russia. How strange a world! Was there a coach there, too? Or—"

"No. No one. And like an idiot, I thought he'd want to see me, so I said hi. But I was wrong, Vitya." Yuuri let some of the anger and sadness he'd been hiding leech into his tone. "He said a lot of… hurtful things, Vitya. I stayed as long as I could, but I left before he could do any more damage." Truthfully, if Yuuri had stayed any longer he would have broken down in front of Yuri, but he was certain that's exactly what the Russian punk had been aiming for. "I made sure that he knew that we come to the rink all the time, in case he decides to reach out."

Viktor did pause to process, if only for a moment. When he raised his words, they were slow, pondering, and thoughtful to the point where he seemed almost nostalgic to say them. "Sahkarok-chan, ljubimyj moj, whatever he said, you haven't seen him in years. Whatever he said and thinks, it's not you. If anyone else in the world can see you other than you, it's me. Even if you're not on the camera. And if you're an idiot, then, idiots must be kind, and kind of cute! And he is him, the angry kitten. An angry, roaring tiny kitten. Even at a free skate."

Pulling into the parking ramp outside their apartment, Yuuri set the car in park and turned the engine off. He nodded solemnly to the call screen on his phone, taking the words to heart. As simplistic as it felt, it was true. Yuri hadn't seen either of them in years. He couldn't possibly know how Yuuri had evolved, or how his and Viktor's love had bloomed, to become the core of each others' very being. It wasn't the kind of connection that could be broken with angry words from a bitter teenage boy.

"You're right, Vitya. Thank you," Yuuri agreed through another smile, albeit a far more somber one than he realized. "But I still require emergency cuddles when you get home, that's non-negotiable."

"A, well, lucky for me, you drive an easy bargain!" Viktor cheered back, relieved to take the thanks at face value. Before the end of the second, however, his point of focus couldn't help but fall away from the verbal damage, back to what had inflicted it. "In between all the, I'm guessing, very loud yells, did he mention why he was here, or was he too busy with the screaming?"

"Unfortunately, no. He was too busy trying to get into a shouting match. But his relative, Katya, did offer me her contact information and it seems to be local."

Having circled around the car, keys in hand, Yuuri opened the back seat. He reached to grab his skates, only to pause, his stomach sinking. He couldn't get the image of Yuri in those rental skates out of his mind. How many times had Yuuri's coaches stressed how important good quality gear was for skaters? How many times had he, Viktor and Yuri had to trade in perfectly good skates for brand new ones to keep an edge to their game? To see Yuri wearing those ratty things left a weight in Yuuri's chest. "I don't know what happened to him, Vitya, but, it's not good."

With a sigh and a nod to nothing, Yuuri shut the door. He circled the parking lot, into the glistening, ever-polished lobby of their apartment. "In any case, once you're home I'll give you Katya's number. I warned her that you would likely call her tonight to talk about Yuri. I have to get into the elevator, but, once I'm settled, I'm going to step into the shower. I'll be sure to use your monogramed towel once I'm done."

As easy as it might have been to get dragged down by the foreboding tone, Viktor was, admittedly, distracted by the thought of Yuuri in their shower. "If you take your time, I could help."

"You're more than welcome. Just, think about what you want to do for dinner. I know that you'll want to talk to Katya and if he's willing, to Yuri, so I'll handle the rest."

Under the rush of the unevenly pressurized water and the occasional, ignored judgmental grumble of his unwilling audience, Viktor finished rinsing off. He turned the knob, pressed his phone to his ear, and savored the sweet words between the otherwise troubling topic. "Well, then. I certainly can't back out of expectations, can I?"

"I love you, Vitya. Text me when you're headed home?"

"No need. Consider me almost there. And, solnysk-uri? I love you, too. More than anyone for anything that isn't this, I love you."

As Viktor had predicted, he'd returned home in time to catch Yuuri at the end of his shower. Granted, Yuuri had deliberately taken the time to wash his hair, condition it for five whole minutes and exfoliate practically every inch of himself to delay getting out, but that was beside the point. The emergency cuddling session contract had been successfully fulfilled, with a few extra minutes added on just because. After that, and a quick walk with Makkachin, Yuuri had headed off to cook, leaving Viktor to sit at the dinner table, cell phone at his side, fixated on the business card of a woman he had never met.

Viktor twirled the card between his fingers, blurring the image. The faintly embossed image of a wedding cake surrounded by stylized roses stared back, along with the full name Yekaterina Yolkin. In preparation or procrastination, Vikto popped her username into Etsy, only to find himself staring at pictures of custom cake toppers, invitations and fabric flower centerpieces—the sorts of things that naturally drew him to look over his shoulder towards his fiancé, hard at work in the kitchen.

"You're sure I can't taste-test? The food or the cook?" Viktor raised his phone overhead, flashing the now-oversized image of a cake topper in Yuuri's vicinity. "I'll trade you a cake topper on skates! We could do tiny lines in the fondant."

Surprised to hear anything from that direction, Yuuri turned towards the open doorframe. He wiped his hands on his apron before closing the small gap between himself and Viktor. Safely at his side, Yuuri leaned over to place a brief, loving kiss on Viktor's forehead. "No, Vitya, I can handle things in the kitchen. You can taste test once you're finished." Before Viktor could argue to the contrary, Yuuri set a second kiss on Viktor's lips, silencing him. Then, he headed back to the kitchen.

Viktor settled back in his seat, seemingly dismayed, albeit in a way that was intentionally overblown. "If you need me, I'll be in here, neglected by Makkachin!" he called back.

Confident that Viktor could handle what was coming next, Yuuri chose not to dignify it with an answer. Instead, he tried to focus on chopping the vegetables for their salads, intentionally interpreting the chatter as white noise, if only so he could avoid cutting his fingers.

Alone with his thoughts and the card once more, Viktor dialed the number. The dial tone rang through the house twice, chiming with tension and impatience. Then, it stopped. "Hello, Something Blue Custom Accessories. How can I help you?" a slightly accented voice crackled through his iPhone.

Viktor folded his arms and huddled closer to the table, leaning over it with a natural, polite sort of smile, the sort he knew would carry through the phone whether he meant it or not. "Dohbriy vyehcheer, Katya! This is Viktor. I'm the old friend of Yuri's who he hasn't screamed at yet today."

There was a quick delay on the other side—a sort of sudden silence, as if something had gone wrong. When she spoke up again, it was with a stutter. "O-oh. Yes. This is Katya. Can you please tell me the problem with your order?"

"No, not an order. This is about Yuri Plisetsky? My fiancé said he said I would call, which, I am me, calling."

Katya, meanwhile, only sounded more intimidated while she scrambled through a canned response. "Give me a moment, I need to loop up your file."

It was such a strange answer to it that Viktor straightened up in his seat. He spoke down directly to the receiver, this time, as if he meant to command the phone's attention. "I don't have a file, just questions. We've been looking for Yurio for ages. Me, mostly, but, Yuuri succeeded so he did much better. So, where is Yurio? Still grumbling?"

Even with the limited audio reception of a phone, Viktor could hear Katya shut the door. A fan turned on in the background, white noise whirring through the connection. Only then did she dare speak. "Yes. Well. Uh. He's been staying here, with us, for now."

"How long has now been, exactly?"

What Viktor had expected was a simple timeline—something to give him a sense if Yuri's stateside presence was tourism or more permanent. Instead, he heard. "About a year and a half, then, since his dedushka passed away…" Katya paused, or, perhaps Viktor only imagined the pause, as he pictured a funeral Viktor no doubt would have attended if he had only known. "…He started college back in January."

"And skating?"

That time, the silence wasn't merely a product of Viktor's imagination. Katya answered by not saying a word.

"Is he there, now?" Viktor tried again.

This time, it didn't take more than a second for Katya to respond with a tense, almost reluctant sigh. "Listen. I know, you're coming from a good place. You and your fiancé. But, I'm not sure if any friendship you'd want to show him is something he's ready for. Please, don't be offended if he can't see you. He hasn't been out of his room since the… incident… this afternoon."

Viktor didn't exactly catch the nuance. "Of course, he doesn't have to see me, it's through a phone."

"I'm afraid to even knock, to be honest…"

Viktor pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, his fingers curling over his lips while he debated what he could try, next. He snapped his fingers with the decision, about to speak up, only for his open mouth to hang in place while someone else interjected. "Is it true?"

One might have thought that, given the change in years, that his voice would have changed, too, yet it was too distinct for Viktor not to leap straight to recognizing the source.

"Yurio? You aren't in a rotting ditch! My heart has never been so warmed by rudeness!"

Having tuned out the conversation as he cut up the tomatoes and onion for his chicken taco salad, Yuuri practically leapt upright at the sudden sound. He stared through the archway, over his shoulder to the scene, only to settle back down and shake his head in wonder as to how, exactly, Viktor thought that was the proper thing to say to someone after not having spoken to them for several years.

Behind the muffled whisper of Katya asking politely that Yuri be gentle with the phone, Yuri hadn't budged from his demand to "Answer the damn question!"

"I could, but, I don't know what you mean."

"What katsudon said. Don't play moron, pizdabolishe," Yuri cursed, in essence, calling Viktor a huge liar in such an overblown way that most people would've meant it as a joke. Yuri, meanwhile, had bafflingly managed the feat of using it as if it were serious. "I know he told you. Is it true?"

It was such a relief to hear Yuri at all that even him being an angry, caustic brat was strangely comforting. Viktor chuckled at the seemingly-bitter but otherwise innocuous question. "O? That I worry? Of course, I meant every wo—"

Before he could finish the words he supposedly meant, the signal spiked with an audible thud. Then, it cut off entirely, redirecting to a loud, alarming dial tone. Viktor choked on what he'd meant to say, replaced with the simple, baffled stumble over the name "Yurio?"

Viktor craned his neck down to stare at the disconnected call. He poked through his call list to dial back. In place of the dial tone, the number redirected to the mail box. "I'm sorry, but the person you are calling does not have a voice mail box open at this time—"

Before the stock answering machine could keep on taunting him, Viktor pressed the end call button. Overtaken by the aftershock, he looked towards the kitchen. "Yuuri! He killed her phone!"

Setting the flame of the skillet back to simmer, Yuuri exited the kitchen once more. He paced out to the dining room table, until he was close enough to Viktor that he could wrap his arms around him in a backwards embrace. He frowned into Viktor's shoulder with sympathy. "I'm sorry, Vitya. I know how much you wanted to talk to him." He set a hand on Viktor's back and ran it up and down for comfort, the repetition numbing his own brain somewhat, too. "I made that shredded chicken you like, with the taco seasoning. Want to come taste test it for me?"

As predicted, Viktor perked at the suggestion. With the phone discarded, Viktor followed Yuuri into the kitchen to help him assemble the salads. After a lovely meal, a few drinks and dessert, the couple spent a leisurely evening together simply enjoying one another's company, followed by a steamy night filled with cuddles, kisses and so much more.

Meanwhile, in the Yolkin house, a teenage boy had just set a new speed record for how quickly a mobile phone could pass from one side of the living room into a fireplace. Thankfully for the phone, it was the middle of summer, so it merely smacked into a protective grate before clattering to the floor, disconnected by the force of impact but otherwise intact.

What should have been a much longer conversation had been left relatively still, the sole witness mostly just gaping in astonishment that they had even seen what just happened. Hardly thirty seconds ago, Katya had been trying to sit down at her workstation for a civilized if terse and tense conversation. Then, as if he had some sort of radar sense or had been screening her calls, Yuri emerged out of nowhere, grabbed the phone from her, and had taken over, only to stomp out of the room in a huff.

Katya tried to stand up after Yuri. Her foot knocked against one of the many storage bins of fabric scraps, which she stumbled over on her way towards the door. "Yura? Come here! What's wrong?" She extended a hand, at least trying to catch his arm or his attention. Yuri hardly even blinked. Instead, he pushed his headphones back over his ears, both symbolically and literally blocking out anything but the noise in his own head. "Can I at least bring you dinner?"

At the same second as she had spoken, Yuri yanked on a cord attached to the ceiling, pulling down a hidden staircase. He took a step up, then another, until he paused to yell back. "No! He'll eat enough dick for both of us! Čórt s nim, pork cutlet bowl!" Before Katya had a chance to explain, Yuri slammed the door, shutting himself back into the attic.

"Uh. Okay, then." Katya stared up at the outline of the now hidden attic door, unsure of what, if anything, she could do. She raised her chin to the ceiling, calling upwards. "There's still pizza, if you change your mind. And we're baking cookies!"

The head of an older child, wearing a backwards baseball cap, a flour-covered hoodie, and the sort of disgust one could only wear if they were a teenager being forced to make cookies against their will, poked out of the kitchen. "Did he just imply he also eats dicks?"

Katya's eyes widened in a silent sort of gasp, her focus pulled from scolding one grumpy teenage boy to another. "For heaven's sake, Misha!"


	3. Chapter 3 - Practice Imperfect

Chapter 3 - Practice Imperfect

Yuri left a note on the kitchen table on his way out. It was barely six words. _I'm fine. Don't look for me._ He hadn't known what else to say. To be honest, he wasn't sure what he was even doing by writing them.

It was a Sunday, now, and barely ten in the morning. The only other people on the street were wearing their finest, most conservative church clothes, or they were the occasional hobbling former drunkard on their way back from a one-night stand. With the hood of his old leopard print Letterman jacket over his head and a slouch in his posture, Yuri strode across cracked sidewalks, past tarnished duplexes and the all-encompassing smell of spilled gasoline, to a bus heading somewhere he wasn't convinced he even wanted to go.

The nearly vacant parking lot of the skating rink blurred under waves of rising heat. Yuri passed across the abandoned blacktop, through the double doors and into the battleground. The padding of the scuffed mats pushed through the holes of his shoes. The sensation shoved a preemptive shudder up his spine. Nonetheless, he moved ahead, traversing the empty entranceway towards the steady, pulsing scratch of sharpened blades colliding with the ice.

With a single, forceful kick, Yuri pushed through the door to the spectator level of the rink. The faint, uniform cold enveloped him, mild and numbing, all-encompassing and yet hardly present at all. Viktor stood at the ice's edge, his hands raised and voice raised higher, giving some sort of instruction to a figure on the ice that was lost in the distance between them.

Yuri raised his head and his chin, trying, and at least superficially succeeding, at projecting a sense of confidence while he shouted across the way. "Sooka syn!"

To Viktor and his pupil, the shout was hardly a murmur, nothing they hadn't trained themselves to focus past. To the lone figure sitting on the bleachers, however, it was enough to make him leap off his seat. Heart racing in dread, Yuuri whipped his head around to see the last person he honestly wanted to; Yuri Plisetsky, calling someone, presumably Viktor, a son of a bitch in Russian.

Releasing a heavy sigh, Yuuri offered Yuri a small wave before turning away. He looked to the ice, to Viktor, as if trying to send out an emergency signal through eye contact alone.

To Yuuri's minimal relief, around that same moment, Otabek came to a stop, thereby freeing Viktor to lift his head to the stands. Viktor's expression lit up instantly, his professional composure giving way to enthusiasm. "Yurio! Sit, sit, we'll be down in a moment!" He waved his hand in a circle, beckoning Yuri towards him.

Instantly, Yuri's feet froze to the padded floor, taken aback at a realization he couldn't articulate. What had come out of him instead was an irate bark. "No! You have enough minions to beck and call!"

Before he could so much as register another angry word, Viktor turned back to Otabek. He mimed the motions of an earlier jump to Otabek as he spoke, the gestures emphasized with more fluidity than the technically excellent, but emotionally detached execution of Otabek's performance moments ago. "One more, Otabek, from the salchow, but, this time, don't calculate; picture the form, the emotion for the motion. Make the audience feel, and everything else melts. Except the ice, obviously, that's fine."

Smirking at his coach's words, Otabek pushed back toward the center to resume his routine, leaving Yuri to stand at the top of the rink, ignored.

"Viktor!" Yuri's shoulders arched up defensively. He raised his voice as loud as it could go, so much so that it cracked under him. "I don't have to listen to you, asshole!"

Yuuri knew that Yuri was eighteen, now, but with the way he was throwing a temper tantrum it was hard to believe that he was legally an adult. At first, Yuri turned his back to the rink. He raised his foot, bracing for something, as if, possibly, he was going to leave. Then, against any sort of logic, he turned to the right, to spot the one, lone dot on the bleachers -to Yuuri.

With an audible clank against the metal, Yuri flopped onto the bleachers. He kicked up both of his feet up to rest on the next bench down, directly beside Yuuri's spot.

"Don't say anything, horseradish dickhead," Yuri grumbled, frustrated, but quieter.

With a silent sigh, Yuuri glanced over his shoulder, towards the long-lost Russian punk, and obliged the request by not saying a word. This, to his increasing frustration, did nothing to stop Yuri from talking to him.

"If you and master Viktor want to make me your business, ask me to my face. Not some underhanded back alley calls to my cousin, got it?" Yuri snapped, a statement that Yuuri couldn't help but roll his eyes to. "Just because you met me before, doesn't mean you know shit now. Or that you should want to. Unless your shared love infection gave you mutual lobotomies, you shouldn't."

Yuri meant for it to come across as a threat, or at the very least, a line in the sand. The problem was, somewhere along the lines of struggling to temper his temper, the intended implication had warped into something closer to dejection. It was strange enough a shift in tone for Yuuri to arch his brow in questioning. Then, in the eye of yet another senseless verbal assault, Yuuri had an epiphany. Regardless of what Viktor wanted, there was no reason he had to put up with this.

Standing up, Yuuri gave Yuri one glance over his shoulder before heading down the aisle, towards the rink and directly away from Yuri.

Like a dog chasing cars, getting exactly what he had wanted left Yuri so baffled that, when Yuuri started to stand, Yuri rose from his perch at the bleachers. He stomped in sync, hardly three steps behind him. "Get back here and listen, katsudon, stay away from me!"

Yuuri stopped to turn and look at Yuri, a hybrid of confusion and irritation overtaking him. "Do you even hear yourself? You want me to stay away from you? I'm trying! You're following me!"

Shaking his head as if he couldn't believe this was happening in real life, Yuuri turned away. Facing in the opposite direction, unfortunately, did nothing to stop Yuri from snapping at his back instead. "You know what I mean asshole! Stay away later after I tell you why!"

The statement was so inherently, stupidly contradictory that Yuuri couldn't help but pause. He tipped his head up to the ceiling in exasperation, blinked in preparation for the inevitable recoil, and confronted the walking issue face to exasperated face. "I get it, Yuri! You don't want us in your life. You don't want us to meddle or reach out to your cousin for information. Consider your message received. I'll stay away from you. Viktor on the other hand, you're going to have to talk to him yourself. But you don't have to worry about me getting involved in your life."

"Bullshit. As if Viktor changes a lightbulb without you involved."

Having said his peace, Yuuri turned and headed down the ice. While he wanted to put on his skates, he wasn't about to stop and give Yuri a chance to catch up. Instead, he planted his sneaker down, gripped the side rail, and headed towards Viktor on foot. What he hadn't quite expected was that, in spite of the literal slippery spot he had walked to, Yuri had still chased after him.

Like Yuuri, Yuri walked out onto the ice still in his shoes, but unlike Yuuri, he didn't grab onto the rail for support. He was so singularly focused that he had barely even changed his stride as he stalked his prey. "Don't lie to me, katsudon! As if I don't know. You might as well get sewn together. The Siamese couple."

As Otabek landed his last jump for the second time, he checked back to Viktor. He could tell by the look on Viktor's face that it was close to what he was expecting, but it wasn't right. Before he could ask for any details, however, both student and coach were distracted by the intruders.

Shifting not so discreetly to stand at the sidelines, directly in Yuuri's path, Viktor looked down to Yuuri with the usual smile, albeit a good amount farther down than normal due to the height difference of his skates. He wrapped his arms around Yuuri, propping him upright and secure on the reflective floor. "Yuuri, did you shrink? You're—" Before he finished the thought, he caught sight of Yuuri's pursuer from over his shoulder. "—being chased by an angry kitten."

The supposed kitten, in this case, had drawn close enough for Viktor to see the white in Yuri's overly narrowed eyes. "Anything he says, you'll know. You can't even have separate shirts, how the f—k do you expect to keep separate stalking victims," Yuri snapped. He raised his hand, reaching out, presumably to swat at Yuuri, only for the force of the swing to pull his balance straight out from under his ratty, sliding shoes. On instinct, he changed his footing just enough to crash sideways, smacking the ice.

Yuuri hadn't seen the slip, but he heard the accompanying thud. It was more than enough to make him wince in sympathy. He leaned into Viktor's embrace, steadying himself as much as was possible.

Without hesitation, Otabek skated over to Yuri. He leaned forward to offer him a hand up. Yuri didn't budge.

Viktor put an arm around Yuuri, checking without words to make sure that he was, indeed, steady. Then, he shouted towards the barely twitching lump on the ice. "Yurio! Hold the wall, or Otabek. He's attached to the hand in front of your face!"

"I'm fine!" Yuri snipped back, still not moving.

"How are you fine? You're on the floor. They're not called sheets of ice to sleep on them."

"Do I look like a moron?"

With his hand still covered in the melting residue of Otabek's routine, Yuri took hold of Otabek's and pulled himself back to his feet. Under his breath, quiet to an extent that he had up to then not proven himself even remotely capable of, he told Otabek a fleeting "thanks," before brushing ice from his pants.

While Yuri was mid-fidget, Viktor had been watching, and, more specifically, had taken to pointing down at a detail he'd found so unexpected he couldn't keep from smiling at. "There's a hole in your shoe."

"And one in your brain." Yuri's eye twitched. He specifically flattened his foot, sliding it sideways so that the tear in his sole was pressing too far down on the ice to be visible. "Whatever you want to ask, do it now. To my face."

The glower that Yuri sent across the ice may as well have been a smile and a wave for all the impact it had on Viktor. He sighed, not with exasperation like Yuuri, but with fondness. "O, Yurio. As if you didn't already answer the most important yesterday." He was, after all, alive, and for the most part well, if surprisingly small and in clothes so well worn that they may have been rejected from donation to a goodwill. It looked like Yuri had the same clothes, face and proportions for years when by any logic, he should have grown— it was almost as if he'd been frozen in time.

Yuuri felt Viktor squeeze him a bit closer for a moment before his arm slipped away. With his eyes on his fiancé, Yuuri relaxed as Viktor gently propped Yuuri's hands along the guard rail. They exchanged one last, locking gaze of confirmation that Yuuri would be ok. Then, Viktor let go, to glide from one Yuuri to the other.

Before there was an opportunity for Yuri to turn or twitch away, Viktor wrapped his arm around Yuri's shoulder. Yuri struggled not to slide, again, and, in doing so, ended up leaning uncomfortably forward into the embrace. Yuri visibly cringed at the contact, both arms locked at his sides, providing all the warmth and comfort of a giant metal pipe while Viktor whispered down to him. "My condolences about your grandfather. Had we known, we would have come."

Having made his touching point, Viktor relaxed his grip. He pulled back, just enough that he could look Yuri in the eye. He kept a hand on Yuri's shoulder, one which Yuri quickly raised his own hand to swat away—a gesture which Viktor ignored in favor of a question. "Are you planning to move countries, here, with other family? You'll pass mark to qualify for residency, soon. You should be eligible, what, next year, then, right?"

Yuri couldn't have looked less impressed if he was half-asleep and dreaming that he was filing tax returns. "No. I'm not."

"A, of course, the sign-offs, no wonder, the federation wouldn't want to let you go, would they? I can call them later, I'm sure—"

It was far from unheard of for skaters, most frequently those from Russia and the United States, to change the country they represented. For those who had skated professionally before, there had to be at least a two-year gap between competitions in order to do so, and, in most cases, a similar amount of time had to be spent living in the skater's new country. The skater's home country would also need to sign permission for that skater to leave—which was rarely a problem, considering that the practice was mostly a result of having too many qualified skaters in one country, and the ones who would elect to leave often wouldn't have represented the country they were departing in international competitions, regardless.

This was, of course, completely irrelevant, for a reason that Yuri found himself shouting out as close to being in Viktor's face as he could get without budging from his perch against the rail. "I'm not skating, asshole!" Yuri wrapped his fingers along the ledge, pulling himself up so he was sitting along the side, as if leaving the surface of the ice would give credence to his point. "Nobody gives a shit about some burnout punk in a dead car city! They moved on! I moved on! I don't care, anymore!"

While Yuri was certainly passionate in his delivery, there was no way someone who shouted that loudly, with that much venom, didn't care. Before Yuuri could even begin to contemplate why Yuri had come here just to convince them he was indifferent when he so obviously wasn't, Yuri's point of focus shifted from Viktor, to Yuuri. "I was right, back then. There was only room for one Yuuri. And it's you—"

"Moved to what, exactly?" Before any sort of vulgarity could be tacked on, as it doubtless would have, Viktor spoke over Yuri to stop him with one, straightforward observation back. "Or are you that passionate about not caring?"

Having had more than enough of the back and forth, Yuuri gripped the side wall and moved a bit closer—not so much that he was in range to be swatted at, but enough that it drew Yuri's eye and his silence, if only for long enough for Yuuri to speak.

"Well, you're in luck, Yuri. I retired after last season. So, if you want the spot of the league's one and only 'Yuuri' then it's yours. If your only excuse is that there's another Yuuri on the leader board, then problem solved." It was a weak argument, yes, but it was deliberately weak to try and get to the heart of the matter; why in the world did Yuri refuse to accept that he wanted to be on the ice?

Yuri's left eye twitched, squinting with what seemed to be a superficial hostility. "With what? Your blessing and a student visa?" He bobbed forward on his perch, buried by the shadows of his hood and his sense of futility. "Brackets are seeded. I've got no club, no preliminary scores, I live in a goddamn attic and I got here on a bus of hungover homeless people. How the hell does your pig head think I can afford shit? You can't compete off dreams and sunshine. You have to pay. What desperate moron's going to coach pro-bono? You?" Yuri pointed at Yuuri, his fingers forming a jab that only the distance between them stopped from hitting.

Yuri was trying to look angry, and, overall, he was succeeding, and yet, Viktor didn't think that was what he was seeing in Yuri right now. Sure, the anger was like him, but what he was choosing to say with that anger wasn't regular, hormonal hostility; it was a cry for help.

Viktor snapped his fingers. He raised his hand overhead in pride at his own idea as it struck him. "Then announce your triumphant return! They have those places, online, like Twitter or Instagram, but to beg for money!"

Summoned by the snapping, Yuri finally broke his focus from Yuuri back to Viktor. "I'm not making a Kickstarter." He huffed and snapped his head away, pretending, and this time failing to convince anyone, that he was ignoring them. "Besides, the season's set. The only cups left to enter are the cup of noodles."

"A, that's nothing. I could call." Viktor flicked his wrist overhead in broad dismissal, as if swatting the thought away. He glided backwards across the ice, away from one Yuri to the other, back to his fiancé's side. He stretched his arm around Yuuri, pulling him close so he could at least get the joy of also seeing his reaction to what he was about to mention. "Worlds go by current year but GP qualifications are on last competitive season averages or invitation. Your last competitive season was years ago. If I asked, they would accept you. I had them on standby saving a spot for Yuuriya just in case he changed his mind at the last second again. If they assumed what Yuri, I can say I mixed up. I'm sure they'd feel much too guilty to say no!"

Whatever anger was on Yuri's face melted off with pure disbelief, both mystified, entranced and mortified all at once. It was the sort of expression one might have had if they had just heard they were secretly some sort of supernatural creature, had been called by destiny to save the world, or, as Yuuri knew far too well, if they had just seen their personal muse and idol show up to their home out of the blue and introduce themselves as their new coach. If literally anyone else had said that, there'd be no reason to believe they meant it seriously. From Viktor Nikiforov, though, it couldn't be anything but intended genuinely—provided he remembered it five seconds from now.

Yuuri, too, was entranced by Viktor, though for a different reason. Amid all the tension and the irritation, Yuuri suddenly, instead found himself smiling at the thought of Viktor 'saving him a spot' for the next Grand Prix series, if he so happened to change his mind. Looking up at his fiancé, Yuuri mouthed the words, 'I love you', before placing a loving kiss on his cheek.

Sure enough, the soft smile set aglow on Yuuri's face washed every other tension out of the room. Viktor nodded back at the silent, unspoken words, echoing the sentiment with his gaze alone.

It was easy enough to say that the rosiness drawing forth in Yuri's cheeks was merely from the chill, but it was wrong. His chest throbbed so much that it was all he could do to drift forward, his hands gripping the rail for support, barely upright. When the words came to them, they were quiet, so much so that it hardly sounded like him repeating to process it. "In two months."

"Or three. Maybe even three and a half. Depending on which competitions you're assigned."

"How in hell do you think I can even skate, still? I fell on my ass."

To that blunt, potentially relevant question, Viktor kept on moving a little closer to Yuuri. He ran his hand down Yuuri's shoulder, down his back and into his back pocket to retrieve Yuuri's cell phone. The gesture alone was enough to make Yuuri blush, but he tried not to let it show too much. It only took Viktor a second to unlock his phone and pull up the video of Yuri from the day before. Beaming with pride that he could prove Yuri wrong so quickly, Viktor flipped the image sideways and pressed play, displaying the footage of yesterday's free skate with the same satisfaction one might have shared a cute animal video. "A, yes, it's on my cloud! Here, a present from sunshine!"

While Yuri stiffened, his mouth both shut and fell so far aside that it was one more startling bit of information away from falling straight off his face, Viktor pointed over at the tiny image of Yuri skating onscreen. "Your angle of approach is off, Yurio. I'm surprised you didn't break anything other than pride on those pauper skates. But your technique's there, and the arch moving into that spin, I'd have thought you'd lose that range of motion by your age."

Despite having recorded the video in the first place, Yuuri stepped forward to watch what details Viktor was pointing out. Even Otabek, who had been deliberately keeping his distance, drew forward to observe.

Yuri's mouth was wide open, still, yet he hardly made a sound. His first instinct had been to face away from the screen and instead focus on glowering at Yuuri. If nothing else, it was better than watching himself in the state of disrepair he'd fallen into; a poor, degraded photocopy of who he should have been. The only thing worse was having Yuuri catch his gaze. The instant they locked eyes, Yuri snapped away, his arms as crossed as his attitude. By default, he ended up watching Otabek, instead.

As the video stopped abruptly, degrading to his cousin Katya scolding him "don't call a child durochka!", Otabek gave a small nod of approval before receding into the background again.

Spotting the discomfort, Yuuri, somehow, found himself less inclined to stay out of it than he'd expected. It seemed like such a waste, to let Yuri stand there, squandering that raw talent on bitterness over something as ridiculous as shared names and a bad disposition.

"You have what it takes to compete, Yuri. We all know that," Yuuri paused, taking in a heavy, visible breath and the blank, transfixed stare he could spot Yuri shooting at him. "We're giving you the chance, it's up to you to take it."

Viktor tucked the phone back into Yuuri's back pocket, his palm passing over Yuuri in a gentle, nonchalant sort of manner that hid any other implications of the gesture from the others in the room. As he somewhat reluctantly retracted himself from the moments spent in Yuuri's presence to the rest of the world, Viktor spotted something he'd been expecting from the start. "A, there you are!"

The gloss of dull dissociation had faded out of Yuri's eyes. Although still encircled by the weight of a sleepless night, there was something else in them, now—a wildfire, lit anew.

For this second, it didn't have to matter what the logic was. It wasn't even a decision. It was the inevitable, the addiction, the gravitational pull of the world Yuri had been born to be in.

Suspecting the natural question to come, Otabek raised his voice over the silence, measured and logical. "I don't mind if Viktor wants to coach us both." While every eye in the room suddenly turned to him, Otabek merely shrugged a shoulder. "Other coaches do it. You'll have to figure out what to do if we get assigned to separate competitions though."

Yuuri only nodded before looking to Viktor. "We'll figure something out," was all he could seem to say.

Viktor couldn't help but to chuckle under his breath at Otabek's insight. "Well, thank you. How generous that you'd share." Viktor reached his hand back out for Yuri's shoulder, the start of what would have been a gentle pat if it landed where he'd aimed. "But there may be someone one on one, if I put the word out, who could focus just on you, specifically."

Before Viktor could so much as graze Yuri's jacket, Yuri's hand jolted up to reach his, snatching Viktor by the wrist. The right side of Yuri's mouth stretched up slowly, as if the muscles hadn't been used in quite some time. "Take responsibility and coach me, asshole!"

Viktor didn't bother to wriggle out of Yuri's grasp. He just waved his finger in scolding. "Ah, ah, ah, that's no way to talk to your coach, is it?"

Missing the implication entirely, Yuri quipped back. "What the hell kind of talk do you want? Russian?"

"I heard you called me Master Viktor, back there. That would do much better, yes?"

Before the inevitable yell back to that remark could spurt out of Yuri, Otabek spoke up. "It's just about lunch time. Why don't we go out and catch up a bit? It's my treat today."

At that thought, Viktor's slid his hand out of Yuri's grasp with a quick twist. He tucked the newly freed hand under his chin in consideration. "We did get a little distracted there, didn't we?"

Looking to Yuri, Otabek turned to head for the gate, but before he did, he looked to Yuri, specifically. "You can ride with me if you want." Before Yuri could reply, Otabek pushed off the ice, past the gates and up to the bleachers.

Whether Yuri had intended to agree with Otabek's invitation or not, Viktor decided to proceed as if he already had. He eyed Yuuri in a silent urge for him to come over. Catching Viktor's gaze, Yuuri slowly but surely headed for the gate alongside Viktor. Once both of their feet were on firm ground again, Yuuri breathed a sigh of relief.

It only took a moment for Viktor to remove his skates, put on his shoes and stretched his arm overhead in a wave to his pupil and his intruder with aplomb. "See you, kids! Text us the address, we'll meet you there!" Then, with his fingers intertwined with Yuuri's, their matching rings pressing side by side, the pair headed up the stairs and through the exit.

Viktor listened for any signs of footsteps following them. A few turns of his head later, feeling assured that the pair of them had indeed been given some semblance of solitude, he came to a stop alongside the wall. "So. Yuuri. What do you think?"

It was all at once a simple and complicated question, both to ask and to answer. There were so many things Yuuri could say, all of them requiring more explanation than the last. Something in his gaze must have given away how conflicted he was, because Viktor saved him by clarifying. "I can find someone else to coach him, with the video, if we need. I bet he's burnt the bridges with Yakov or he wouldn't be here, but, there're others. A specific coach just for him could be better, much better, so, it doesn't have to be me if you don't want."

In all his intended consideration, Viktor hadn't watched his choice of words enough to notice that he hadn't posed a neutral question. By putting it on Yuuri that he would have to specifically say no, Viktor had already implied that he wanted to. Evidently, he was kind of a sucker for inspiring dejected skaters named Yu(u)ri.

While this didn't escape Yuuri's notice, he couldn't help but pause. He closed his eyes, as if trying to gather his thoughts and his words with care. If he was being honest with himself, Yuuri did feel a lot of hesitation in giving his blessing, but at the same time he knew that if Viktor didn't coach Yuri, vouch for him, then no one would. Viktor, too, closed his eyes to block out the other signals, instead concentrating on that feeling of the metal rings pressing together, their bond before they even had the words for it. From long before that moment, there had been such a synchronicity between them, it was both the only thing and everything either of them could possibly need to survive.

Feeling the grip of Viktor's hand in his, Yuuri thought back to the day when Viktor had forced his way into his life. Without Viktor's encouragement and guidance, he never would have competed again. He would have missed out on not only some of the best times of his life, but the love of his life.

Gripping Viktor's hand a bit tighter, Yuuri opened his eyes to catch his fiancé's expectant gaze, to give the answer he so clearly wanted to hear. "Yes. Let's give him the same chance you gave me. It'll be up to him to get there, but let's do all that we can to support him." There was no telling what the next few months would bring, but Yuuri knew one thing; he was going to require many emergency cuddle sessions along the way.

A laugh fluttered from Viktor, airy with relief and amusement. "Oh, Sahkarok, I promise to eternity, he is not getting all the same chances as you did."

Yuuri leaned in and placed his lips against Viktor's in a lingering, loving kiss. The lingering traces of a chuckling breath left Viktor as he leaned into Yuuri, returning the kiss and savoring the future memory all at once.

Cupping Viktor's cheek, Yuuri parted their lips and pressed his forehead against Viktor's. He stared at him, straight on, as if the one person in front of him was the sole point in his universe he could or would see. "Don't ever change, okay?"

Viktor raised his other hand, the one which hadn't been preoccupied holding onto Yuuri, to the point under his chin, entangling them even further. From a distance, they were so far ensnared in each other that it might look like they could never get out, but, in a sense, Viktor supposed that was the point of it all, wasn't it?

Soon enough, and yet not nearly quickly enough, the two of them had settled into their car in the parking lot. It was such a quintessential scene of young love—the sort of adoration that people without any sense of fun would have assumed them much too old for—to curl together in the cramped, barely existent space of the front seats. Once they were locked inside, however, there'd been no way Viktor could possibly help himself but to answer Yuuri's request in the most honest way he could think to.

Viktor leaned over the seat, to the point where his breath was pressing against Yuuri's neck. He put his hand against Yuuri's heart, his fingertips brushing the collar of his shirt. "Sorry, Yuuri. I can't promise what I can't keep. If I don't change, then, how can I keep falling more and more in love with you?"

They needed to wait for Otabek's text before they could leave, so they naturally had some time to kill. What better way to pass it than by making out in the privacy of their car?


	4. Chapter 4 - Fangirling the Flames

Chapter 4 - Fangirling the Flames

No matter how loudly Yuri shouted "Viktor!" at his back, he didn't turn around. Within an instant, both Viktor and Yuuri were gone.

Beside the ice in his worn-out sneakers, Yuri stared across the empty rink from his perch on the guard rail, letting the phantoms sink in. He wrapped his arms around himself, clutching each elbow in its opposite hand, as if that grip was the one thing that could confirm his own existence.

"Yobaniy nasos…" he muttered under his breath in a beleaguered sort of astonishment. Invitation to the Grand Prix or not, how in the seven levels of hell did he think he was going to pull this off?

At the second click of the door closing shut, Yuri blinked back out of his imagination. He vaulted off the ledge, and stomped the two steps over to composed, silent Otabek, who had been unlacing his skates on the lowest bleacher and paying the absolute minimum attention to him.

"Why the hell'd you offer that? Sharing Viktor?" Yuri asked, although the sharpness of the words made it sound far more like a demand than a question. He planted afoot along the bleacher, hunching over Otabek to cast a looming, flickering fraction of a shadow across the fellow skater. "What, you think I'm pathetic enough it doesn't matter? Pity's a weakness, you know."

Placing his skates aside, Otabek laced up the steel-toed monstrosities that were his boots. He rose from the bleacher to stand on roughly equal ground, the shadows sliding off of him. He stared back at Yuri, unflinching. "You don't remember me, but I remember you, Yuri. We're rivals, you and I. What kind of competition would it be if we didn't start on equal ground?"

"Normal?" Catching himself as having answered with a question, Yuri tried to conceal the fact that he'd caught that particular habit from a four-year-old with a mask of aggression and confidence. "Fair is a fallacy. Play nice, eat ice."

Immune to the false bravado, Otabek looked down, straight into the confused face of a challenge he'd been waiting for since he was a child, with a small, genuinely confident smirk. "Take the offer or leave it on the ice. Either way, with Viktor or without him, you and I are going to go head to head at the Grand Prix. I, for one, can't wait to see what you can do."

Before Yuri could manage whatever grandstanding he'd desperately try to pull off next, Otabek turned to head up the stairs. He pulled his phone from his pocket as he went, texting the name of the restaurant to Viktor as he headed out. "I hope you like burgers and fries!"

Without a second's gap, Yuri fell into step behind Otabek, lengthening his stride to make up for the lost ground of Otabek's head start. He raised his posture to peer over Otabek's shoulder, trying and failing to counter his sportsmanship with an ill-fitting but gradually more convincing smirk of his own. "Maybe you should hope you like silver!"

The fake attitude dropped the instant Yuri was face to headlights with his ride.

The moment they stepped onto the parking lot, Otabek headed straight for his Harley.

He removed his spare helmet from his saddle bag and extended it towards Yuri, silently offering him a ride.

Yuri, meanwhile, didn't budge. Instead, he gaped on in dead-eyed uncertainty, as if he meant to point, but was too stunned to do more than plainly state the first thought that popped into his head. "You'll disfigure yourself on this."

Otabek straddled his bike and turned the engine over. He arched a brow back to Yuuri, asking without words whether or not he was coming.

The look was lost on Yuri, who had instead turned his head to stare away, across the parking lot. There, in that moment of hesitance born from self-preservation, Yuri spotted Yuuri and Viktor together in their car.

Far off in the admittedly minimal distance that was the other side of the lot, the intertwined pair should have been hardly a blip to anyone. Still, behind the steam they were casting across the front windows, Yuri could feel the not-so-private show of intimacy that was Viktor's mouth marking Yuuri's neck.

Without so much as a blink in hesitation, Yuri snatched the spare helmet from Otabek's grasp. He practically flung himself across the seat, both of his arms wrapping around Otabek in a cobra's grip. From here, with his helmet on and his head turned to the opposite side, he had thought Otabek wouldn't notice the nearly fluorescent shade of pink he'd turned to.

Yuri was so preoccupied on the task of not looking towards the car that he completely failed to notice Otabek looking over his own shoulder. Rather than point out the obvious, Otabek pulled out of the parking lot, straight past Yuuri, Viktor, and their kissing rendezvous.

Although Yuri had been sure to stay turned in the opposite direction, he had still raised a very specific finger and shouted as they drove by the happy couple. "Screw this in the mouth! Tint your fucking windows!" Yuri rolled his eyes towards the top of the helmet as they passed by.

The hold Yuri had on Otabek's waist was proof enough that he wasn't that uncomfortable with physical contact. Something about that car, specifically, had set Yuri into a huff, or so Otabek suspected.

It hardly took the first thirty seconds at the restaurant for Otabek to peg exactly what.

Lunch went about as well as could be expected. Yuri ate his burger with a scowl on his face only to stop partway through, twitch, and then went back to nibbling as if nothing had happened. Otabek, having chosen the restaurant, ate his cheeseburger and fries as if he didn't have to worry about his figure. Yuuri and Viktor had opted for grilled chicken sandwiches instead, and were as inseparably nestled together as the separate chairs would allow.

Throughout the meal Yuri had been throwing glares his way, but Yuuri had come to accept that as his normal expression, these days. Otabek kept glancing from Yuri to Viktor and Yuuri and back, little smirks and head shakes alerting Yuuri to some inside joke. Despite the sideways glances, the rest of the meal was pleasant—a fact which may have been made possible due to Yuri not speaking a word.

There was a point, when Otabek went to pay and Viktor followed after him to give him his instructions for the remainder of the day, when Yuri and Yuuri had been left face to face, alone.

Rather than deal with that prospective catastrophe, Yuuri took out his phone. He did his best to look interested in whatever random social media site he had pulled up in the rush to be preoccupied.

In spite of the food stuck to the side of his mouth—the natural risk and residue of him munching down so many fries in a hurry—Yuri still managed to look dour as ever while he stared Yuuri down. That same, fixated stare held for a solid fifteen seconds before he pointed towards Yuuri's chest. "Katsudon. Your shirt's backwards."

Despite knowing full well that he was properly dressed, Yuuri looked down at his shirt to find it perfectly in order. Smirking at Yuri and his childish joke, he turned his attention back to his phone before answering. "Very funny, Yuri."

It was the closest either of them could muster to a conversation.

Thankfully, it didn't take Viktor long to relay his 'orders' to Otabek, who said a quick 'goodbye' before heading for his bike. Within a fraction of a second, Yuri rose from the table, practically scrambling after Otabek in the rush to leave Yuuri behind.

Otabek hadn't noticed he had a tag-along until he was already beside his bike, putting his helmet on. When he caught sight of Yuri, he smirked back at him, amused. "Sorry, Yuri. You're riding with the love birds."

Taken aback with both a literal step and figurative, bulging eyes of discomfort, Yuri's stomach lurched down with a piece of news he found far more distressing than he logically should have. The emotional smoothie of confusion and irritation only amused Otabek more, so much so that he couldn't resist teasing him a little.

Otabek leaned towards Yuri, whispering at a hush that only Yuri could hear. "Don't look too green. He might notice."

The feeling, and related expression, of utter and complete dread was at least in part paused by the sheer confusion that came from the whispered remark. Yuri eyed him from the side, no longer that angry if only because he genuinely didn't get why he had to specify in the first place. "Why the hell would I look like an amateur?"

Hiding a laugh at how the intended meaning of that advice had gone entirely over Yuri's head, Otabek straddled his bike. He started the engine before looking back to Yuri. "We'll ride again soon. See you on the ice."

Relieved in the moment of passing peace, Yuuri stacked the trays from their table. He strolled past the ringing bell of the restaurant door, over to Viktor's side. His hand slipped naturally into his fiance's grasp as he watched the exchange between Otabek and Yuri from a distance. Although Yuuri couldn't hear what was being said, he saw the moment Otabek drove off without Yuri, leaving the befuddled Russian punk to the two of them. Shaking his head, Yuuri couldn't help but smile for some reason. "This shopping trip is going to be interesting."

"Oh. Em. Gee!" The salesgirl behind the counter of the 'Pro Figure Skates Inc.' shop had taken one look at Viktor and Yuuri and nearly lost her mind. Eyes wide, smile even wider, she gasped and squealed in pure delight before coming around the counter to greet them. "It's you!" She squeaked with clear stars in her eyes at the sight of Viktor. Then, she looked to Yuuri. "And YOU! I can't believe it!"

In what was, one could assume, a learned response, Yuri had lurched away the moment he'd heard the pitch of a loud, squealing girl. He had pulled up the hood on his jacket, huddled over, and had physically moved himself to stand directly behind Yuuri to avoid her line of sight.

Yuuri smiled a bit sheepishly before looking to Viktor. While they were well known in athletic circles, he wasn't used to getting this kind of attention in public. Viktor, on the other hand, had absolutely no trouble basking in the glow of attention. If anything, he seemed to automatically reflect it right back at the clerk. "Yes! This is us. We are people!"

Straightening up a bit, the clerk smiled through a nervous giggle before looking to Yuuri and Viktor. "I'm sorry, I'm just such a huge fan of both of you. I always dreamed about meeting you two, I never thought you'd come into my shop!"

Viktor flicked his wrist in front of himself, dismissing the concern as one might a fly. "No, no, don't worry. We don't get recognized very often. It's quite fun for us too, actually. Though forgive Yuuri for being shy. It's been a while since he's been lavished with compliments that aren't from me!"

Glancing at the clerk's name tag, Yuuri smiled and extended his hand in greeting. "We apologize if we startled you, Amber. We're here to buy some skates for our friend here." Yuuri stepped aside as he spoke, allowing himself to gesture towards the sour looking, wild Yuri Plisetsky burrowing into his jacket behind him. "Something in a size seven or eight, perhaps?"

Viktor made sure he was smiling enough for all three of them when he bobbed in agreement. "Yes, for our grumpy, tiny friend."

Amber practically beamed with joy at the prospect of helping Yuuri Katsuki and Viktor Nikiforov pick out skates for their acquaintance. "Oh, of course! Right this way! Take a seat, I'll be riiiight back!"

As promised, Amber wasted no time in pillaging every shelf, back room and hidden cabinet. In no time, Yuri had been enshrined in a small fort of every professional level skating boot the store had to offer. In the eye of the shoe storm, as if he had suddenly become the king of skating boots sitting on his throne, stood Yuri. He'd open a box, slide on the shoes, stand up, and either walk around the store for a few minutes while stretching in odd positions, or simply sit right back down again without a word.

Yuuri stood off to the side, arms crossed over his chest, observing through a smile. The fact that Yuri was completely silent and docile in the presence of Amber, had not escaped Yuuri's notice. He made a mental note that if Yuri started misbehaving too badly, a tweet to that old Yuri's Angels account might be in order.

After the last of the boxes had been carted out, Viktor looked right back to the clerk with a smile. He extended one of the rejected boxes back to her in its place. "Thank you, Amber! We won't be needing this, but we're looking, still. Also, if you can set aside blades? Standard John Wilson, if they're there in back?" he asked.

Amber perked up with an obedient, eager "Of course! Just one sec!"

"Thank you!"

In Amber's absence, Viktor crossed through the boot tornado, directly over to Yuri. He took a knee, bent over, and pressed his hand to the top of the boot, marking where Yuri's toe was resting with his palm.

"You may not have long to wear the boot in, so, we may want a second lightly used pair that we can treat in case the first ones don't wear in time through practice." Viktor reached his hand around the back, next, holding the heel of the boot. Had it been Yuuri standing this close, he may have rightfully been concerned about being kicked in the face. Viktor having no such fear, just kept talking to the boot as if it could answer him. "What did you think of the Riedell? Those have more support at the base overall, usually."

Yuri raised his left foot, mimicking half of the approach to a jump with the leg Viktor wasn't anchoring down. "I'm more stable on these."

Unhindered by this, Viktor stood up. He raised his hands in a clap. "Ax, that's a relief. With those mood swings, I didn't know you were stable on anything!"

Unlike the knock against him Otabek had tried minutes ago, that one, Yuri managed to catch at full force. His eyes widened in pure, almost mortified shock that Viktor had just very loudly and very cheerfully essentially called him crazy.

Viktor's smile beamed back, undeterred. "Now, do a spin! And that's not of your eyes."

Not in a position where he could ignore the instruction, Yuri did as he was told. Without raising his arms into the proper stance for anything but huddling for warmth, he mimicked what would have been the motions of a layback spin. He, naturally, had no momentum to finish a rotation on solid carpet, so he had to march the rest of the way through and reposition himself to stare straight on back at Viktor.

"Next time, I'll spin your damn head, Vik-chan," Yuri grumbled.

Excited, Viktor turned as well. He moved away from the stack of boxes, to paw at Yuuri's shoulder and call his attention. "Aw, how sweet! Yuuri, listen, he remembers your old dog." With the same, amused sparkle of someone knowing full well what they were saying, Viktor gestured back to Yuri. "Now grand jeté to a fifth arabesque!"

Hearing footsteps from the back which could, very well, have been the clerk returning, Yuri didn't back-sass Viktor at all. Instead, he suppressed an eye twitch, focused on the order and, in the small amount of space he had inadvertently cleared amongst the boxes for his spin, moved from a first position stance into the leap of a grand jeté. In spite of the special limitations restricting the jump, it might have even seemed graceful—aside from, of course, the hands he hadn't bothered to remove from his hoodie.

Viktor's attention called aside after watching the display he'd asked for, he checked right back to the cashier again. "O, Amber, do you know what other customers thought were better on the heel huggers, this SP-Teri or the Harlicks?"

While Viktor was distracted with the clerk, Yuuri kept a watchful eye from the sidelines. He had faded so far into the background that, it seemed even Yuri wasn't bothering to glare at him, anymore. Instead, he'd been staring ahead, at a mirror. Yuuri made a conscious decision not to pay attention, until, from the corner of the eye he'd planned not to watch through, he saw a pose.

In the middle of the chatter, gear, and throne of skating boots, Yuri had set a hand along the bench. He stretched up, then back, with his left leg straight on the ground and his right overhead. Then, once he'd stabilized, Yuri fidgeted to move his right hand off the bench and try to grab his boot from over his shoulder. He flailed a bit, his back arching slightly off center, or his arm just missing, but, from what Yuuri could see squinting at him, he was pretty sure that Yuri was trying to mimic the central pose of a full Biellmann spin.

For that split second, even Amber, who had been excitedly discussing the effectiveness of various support systems for supporting the foot during intense jumping patterns, had paused when she caught sight of the stretch. Normally, male skaters only attempted half Biellmann spins, as they'd physically lack the kind of flexibility required. Yuri was one of the few male figure skaters to perform a full Biellman at senior competition in the past due to his feminine, petite frame back then—but despite his age and what should be a changing physique, it seemed he wanted to push himself.

Spotting this struggle which was, while flailing, strained and crooked, at the very least a form of effort, Viktor observed with interest. His forehead creased as he considered how long to watch.

After a few lingering moments of watching Yuuri's reaction, Viktor left one Yuuri's side in favor of the other. He set a supportive hand under Yuri's leg, supporting his unstable stance. "Start with a stretch. Stop the hand, just the leg, and bend the top knee," He moved Yuri into the position as he described it, posing him back into a lower, more stable half pose.

With any potential topples averted, Viktor took a step back, rejoining Yuuri along the wall to observe. He cupped his hand under his chin in pondering. "Wait, is that how you look when you like something? You like that pair?"

Yuri raised his chin higher, his nose now pointing to the ceiling. He strained to speak up enough that the words could even carry through the weight of the stretch. "Shut up."

"That's not how you say yes, Yurio. Did you catch amnesia and forget English?"

Smirking lightly at the banter, Yuuri shook his head. He glued himself along the wall, letting Viktor play in peace.

"Amnesia's not contagious, durachok."

"And down." Viktor clapped his hands, again, taking the small victory that Yuri's word of choice for him had already downgraded from son-of-a-bitch to something that was often meant as an affectionate joke. Again, Viktor checked back on Yuuri, eager and thoughtful. "Yuuri, can you find Amber? I think we should offer to take a picture with her. It'll be fun."

"Oh, yes. I'll be right back," Yuuri bobbed his head. He pushed away from the wall, leaving the banter behind to move toward the back of the store. He opened the cracked door to the stock room, to find Amber kneeling on the floor, searching through drawers.

Yuuri knocked on the door to approach his presence. "Amber?" In spite of the effort to give some forewarning, Amber still leapt in surprise. Yuuri chuckled nervously. "Sorry. And thank you for all of your help. We really appreciate it."

Amber sprung to her feet, turning to Yuuri's side with stars in her eyes. "Oh it's been my absolute pleasure! Is there anything else I can get for you?" From that look of sheer admiration, as if he was some form of deity, Yuuri knew he could have asked her to do practically anything and she'd probably have agreed.

"Actually, Viktor thought that you might want a picture with us. We figured it was the least we could do to say thank you for all your help."

Amber made a sound that, from her smile, Yuuri could only assume had been meant as a yes. The well of admiration in her eyes practically spilled over into tears of joy as they walked out into the store together.

By the time Yuuri made it back, Yuri was plopped into the boot warmer, waiting for the newly heating leather to mold to his feet. Viktor set three other boxes down at the counter, waiting. He sprung away from their future purposes, back towards Yuuri and Amber, the instant they came into sight.

With a smile, Yuuri took Amber's phone, a shiny pink case appropriately adorned with the silhouette of a female ice skater. "You take the picture, Vitya. You have the longest arms."

Amber was squealing and visibly bouncing up and down in place with glee as she watched her phone pass from one of her idols to another.

Viktor held out the phone, and wrapped an arm around Amber, his hand landing on the edge of Yuuri's shoulder. Yuuri in turn wrapped his arm around her lower back to move in a bit closer, centering Amber at the middle of the picture. Viktor held the phone out as far as possible, angled it for the most flattering light, and cheered "Say cheese!"

A couple of safety shots later, Viktor stepped back. He handed the phone to Amber, who cradled it to her chest as if it was the most precious thing in the world. The tears, which had been welling for hours, poured out along with her cheer. "Oh, my goodness! Thank you both soooo much~! I love it!"

"Of course. It's nothing compared to your help!" He set his hand on Amber's shoulder, giving her a quick, friendly sort of passing pat. "Thank you for your support! Of us and his feet."

His point made and the last of the photos taken, Viktor allowed himself to check back on Yuri who was, at the moment, back to standing, and was walking around in circles in his new boots. "Are you planning to take those off? They're already cold"

Yuri didn't so much as pause to look back at him. "I know how to wear in boots, you idiot."

The dry, passionless way in which Yuri dismissed it was just so straightforward that Viktor couldn't help teasing back. "I know! I had to check with you because of the contagious amnesia. I thought you gave it to me, but then I forgot I forgot, so, here we are."

It took Amber a few minutes to calm down to cash them out, but by the time they left, she'd given them her card and told them to contact her if they ever needed anything. Little did any of them know, before they'd so much as buckled in to leave the parking lot, Amber had posted the photo on her Instagram, Facebook page, Twitter, Tumblr and her fan club website. By the time they'd made it home, the picture had gone viral, all because of one sulking figure in the background; a figure that looked suspiciously like Yuri Plisetsky.


	5. Chapter 5 – Rake and a Porcupine

Chapter 5 – Rake and a Porcupine

The second Yuri opened the front door of Cousin Katya's house, he was met by an outburst of concern.

"Yura, where were you all day? Your phone went right to voice mail and Nina kept on—" Katya started to ramble, only to cut herself off mid-thought at the sight of Yuri. Her eyes fell to the numerous shopping bags, followed promptly by the stack of seven separate shoe boxes Yuri was struggling to hold straight.

Taking advantage of the moment of silence, Yuri pushed past Katya. He kicked his leg out in front of him, clearing a path for himself around her. Katya scooted back, too baffled to do more than blink at the sight of him. "Please don't tell me these are stolen. I mean… even if they are stolen, if there's a shoe theft racket in my house, I don't want to be liable for that, please."

"They're mine," Yuri answered, the twinge of impatient exhaustion seeming to imply that the words 'you idiot' may have been redacted from the end.

The snapping only seemed to raise more questions for her, the most important being. "But, how?"

With his back turned to Katya, Yuri kicked off his tattered, old sneakers. He knocked them back through the open front door, onto the porch. "A sugar daddy. Why the shit would it matter?"

"Because. Uh," Katya hesitated mid-thought, unsure of what she could say, "I don't know if anyone had the talk with you and I don't think I want to give it to you if they hadn't, so, that, maybe?"

For one, fleeting second, Yuri made enough eye contact to shoot one last, hopefully rhetorical question back at Katya. "Why in hell would I literally fuck someone for shoes?"

As if this were a totally normal way to end the conversation, Yuri rushed down the hallway. On instinct, Katya scolded him back. "Language!"

In the absence of any children or, indeed, any other waking witnesses at all, Yuri felt no need to address this. Instead, he headed up the stairwell, leaving Katya at the door.

Katya reached back for Yuri's old shoes. She set them carefully back at the door, lining them up perfectly parallel with the rest of the family's line of sneakers, before chasing after Yuri. "That wasn't an answer, Yura!"

By the time Katya had made it upstairs, Yuri had already dropped the boxes in the middle of the floor. Yuri stretched to grab a cord from the ceiling, loosening the tile to reveal a hidden retractable staircase to the attic. He kicked on the bottom step, securing the folding staircase, grabbed the top half of the stack of boxes, and carried them upstairs.

Still trailing along behind him, Katya set her foot on the bottom step. She tilted her head, struggling to see what Yuri was doing. "You could at least tell me where you were, you know."

At first, Yuri ignored her. He climbed back down the stairs to grab another box. It wasn't until Katya had stepped on the bottom stair, directly in his path, and stared straight through him with a wide-eyed, puppy-worthy gaze to ask through a near whisper "are you okay, at least?", that Yuri stopped being able to ignore her.

Yuri brushed past Katya's shoulder to grab the rest of his boxes. He didn't speak until he was halfway back upstairs. "I don't need a ride, tomorrow. I switched classes. Except Tuesday night, they're online."

Thinking, mistakenly, that she understood, Katya immediately turned sympathetic. "Oh. Did you not like the teachers? There're other options."

At the top of the staircase, Yuri stopped to shut the door. His hand paused mid-gesture when he spotted Katya scaling the steps behind him. She stared up at him from below, her eyes still swelling with a tide of concern.

With a silent huff, Yuri turned away from her. He opened one of the boxes, unearthing a new pair of boots. "I need days. I'm training with Viktor."

Katya poked her head up from the hole that was the entrance to the attic. Her voice rose with disbelief. "Viktor… Nikiforov?"

"No. Frankenstein. I'm bringing corpses to life." Yuri tied one of his new boots on. He stretched his foot inside of it, flexing the leather to keep wearing them in. "Yes, Viktor Nikiforov!"

Although he'd snapped it like it was a logical conclusion, Katya could only stare. She continued to hover at the base of the stairs, watching in budding confusion as Yuri ignored her in favor of opening a second shoe box. He grabbed a sharpie off of his desk, pull the brand new pair of plain white sneakers over his hand, and began to draw jagged tiger stripes across the fabric.

At a loss of what else she could or should do about any of this, Katya settled on the simplest she could think of. "…Do you need a lunch or something?"

Yuri dismissed her without a blink. "That, I'll steal."

Without any other obvious questions, Katya was left at the wayside, stunned to the point of disbelief. "Uh. Okay. Goodnight, then?"

The moment that Katya took her final step down the staircase, the door shut over her head. She stood at the center of the hallway, listening to the thud of Yuri's footsteps, until something else joined, too. The muffled sway of classical music trickled through the wood and plaster, the sort of melodies that she'd only ever heard in the background of commercials that had insisted on using materials from the public domain.

She stared for so long up at that ceiling that, when she first moved to leave, she'd walked straight into a wall.

Rubbing the bridge of her nose as she headed downstairs, Katya picked up her phone. It was late, but she still dialed in the number that had been listed on Yuuri's card.

"I don't know what you said to Yura but, whatever it was, thank you, and your fiancé. Can we have you over for dinner? I think, maybe, we should try to talk without someone throwing my phone into a fireplace, this time?" She paused for a second, catching why that was, possibly, not the best way to put it, and specified over accordingly. "…The fire wasn't on."

A few smiles and pleasantries later, Yuuri had come to an agreement. "That sounds great, Katya. Yes, we'll see you tomorrow at seven. Have a good night."

Ending the call, Yuuri smiled down at the screen for a moment before looking to the other side of the living room. The two of them, plus Makkachin, had settled after their long day of shopping for a late night of Viktor calling in favors. On the opposite side of the space, so close and yet still too far away, Viktor sat hard at work on their couch, lit by the glow of his laptop. A few files, which Viktor had pulled from the fireproof box in a folder labeled for tax returns, was open to his left, and a guidebook of foreign phrases was sitting to his right. With his own call taken care of, Yuuri had little else he needed to do but stroke Makkachin's head and watch his fiancé work some verbal magic to secure Yu(u)ri's spot for the Grand Prix.

"Yes, yes, I saw the preliminary assignments, but, we put in long before May. It was a surprise. The record of the other spots should be with, Thierry, was it? Yes. Thierry. I forwarded the email where he wrote it." Viktor's smile broadened with every word, outputting his full charm offensive through his voice alone. "It's under Yuuri Katsuki. Should say Yuri Plisetsky. So used to signing wedding invitations, I must have daydreamed off and put down my lunnyyeluchi!" he gushed, in this case, essentially calling Yuuri his moonbeam.

From the pause and friendly puff of a laugh that came out of Viktor's mouth next, one could assume the person on the other line had stopped to congratulate him on the engagement. "Why, thank you! It's not soon enough. After Finals, of course, I have to see one more gold medal before the rings. So, can you? Faites-le, s'il vous plait?"

Out of the corner of his eye, Viktor poked his head away from his workstation. He poked his head up enough to look straight at Yuuri, then pointed at the phone and gave him a thumbs up. "A, not French. Bitte, then, a gorgeous bitte?" Viktor opened a tab on his browser to quickly google common German phrases. His index finger and his breath both came to a relieved stop when he heard what he'd been waiting for. He flopped back against the couch in relief. "Tausend dank, Astrid! Auf weeding-hole-wren!"

Before the woman could correct Viktor that, no, the way you said goodbye to someone in German on the phone had nothing to do with birds or weeds, Viktor had already hung up.

"Yayta!" Viktor cheered, again, managing to mangle the language he had been aiming for. He craned his head to look back over to Yuuri. "They'll revise the GP postings! Now, to tell the Federation."

Interpreting the pause in calls to be a good moment to interrupt, Yuuri took a seat on the other side of the couch. He leaned back into the spacious cushions and moved aside, freeing up space for Makkachin to hop up alongside him. Viktor sent Yuuri one more encouraging smile before turning back to his contact list. He draped over the arm of the couch while he started over on the next favor "Dobroe, Oksana! Kai dilag?"

Whatever it was that the woman had to say to him, that cheerful mood was siphoned out of Viktor quicker than a boulder sank into quicksand. "…Da?" Viktor slid over in his seat, rolling sideways across the couch. He curled against the phone, away from Yuuri to concentrate.

Makkachin's head settled on Yuuri's thigh, absorbing the attention that Viktor was avoiding. Yuuri had been in the middle of what Makkachin seemed to think of as a particularly good scratch behind his ear when Yuuri heard a chime from his pocket.

It was unusual enough to get this many calls so late that, at first, Yuuri expected to see Katya's name pop up again. When his contact listing instead flashed with Christophe Giacometti, Yuuri didn't hesitate to answer, although he couldn't help but wonder why, exactly, he was calling in the first place. "Hey, Chris. How are you?"

"Yuuri~ why didn't you tell me?" Chris' rich accent rolled in Yuuri's ear, his tone suggesting that Yuuri had failed to notify him of some pertinent detail about his life. The last time this happened, Chris had snuck up on Yuuri, grabbed his ass and purred in his ear. Luckily for Yuuri, there was no way for Chris to reach through the phone to grope him, but that didn't stop the purr from translating through.

With a nod back into his side of the conversation, Yuuri looked to the phone and asked the most logical follow up question he had. "Tell you what, Chris?"

"Tell me what? That you found Yuri~."

The words made Yuuri's eyes go wide with surprise. "W-what makes you think that?" he stuttered, wondering how, exactly, Chris could have found out already. Yuuri had hardly finished asking the question when his phone chimed with a text message alert. "One second Chris, I'm going to put you on speaker."

With a quick press of the button, Yuuri switched the call over to speaker. He moved into his texts to find a photo message from Chris. It was a screenshot from someone's blog of the photo Yuuri, Viktor and Amber had taken together a few hours ago. The only difference was that a large red circle had been drawn around the sulking blurry figure of Yuri, who stood off in the background stretching his new boots. The caption beneath the photo read 'Yuri Plisetsky returning to the world of professional figure staking?'

"Oh…I see what you mean." Was all that Yuuri could think to say.

Chris' rich chuckle emanated from the phone's speaker and filled the room. "We both know that that is Yuri Plisetsky sulking in the background, Yuuri~ Now tell me, what is going on over there? Is there some reunion I wasn't invited to?" At this point there was no denying it. While fan girls online could debate and contemplate who was in the photo, for those who knew Yuri, it was clear that it was him and not some doppelgänger.

With no other options left, Yuuri struggled to explain. "Yes, that is Yuri and no, we're not hosting a reunion. I ran into him by chance yesterday at a local ice rink. It took a little convincing, but Viktor is going to coach him and try to get him up to speed so he can compete this season," Yuuri looked to Viktor as he mentioned his name, trying to check on his progress—or rather, from the looks of it now, the lack of progress he was making.

"Oh~! That explains why you were in the skate shop! I was hoping that you were going to give it another season, but this is just as interesting!" Chris cheered.

Viktor let out another "da," at one point, although Yuuri had no context to know if it was a "huh?" sort of da or a "yes" da until, finally, Viktor managed to get a word in.

"How did you guess? Yes, Yuri Plisetsky. Which makes seven guys seeded for Russia! I just spoke with ISU and it's all—cho?" Viktor cut off his own sentence in ever-escalating confusion, squinting into the dot of a button on the back of the couch cushion. "My apology, this connection is fuzzy. It sounded like you said—" Again, he stopped suddenly, a sort of understanding sinking deeper in. "A. You said what you said, then."

Before Yuuri could eavesdrop any further, he was drawn back in by Chris' enthusiasm. "Perhaps I should come and visit, you know, offer my support in person. We could go drinking! And I can help you with the wedding plans! That is, unless you've finally decided to run away with me, Yuuri~?"

Although Yuuri was well aware that Chris was a major flirt, Yuuri wasn't used to the attention. Viktor was his first and only boyfriend, so when anyone flirted with him or made blatant advances, he would either say something embarrassing or be rendered speechless with blushing cheeks – like right now. Looking up at Viktor for help, Yuuri tried and failed to articulate that no, although he was flattered, he wouldn't be running away with Chris, yet all that came out of his mouth were a few strained groans of embarrassment.

Distracted by one crisis on his phone by the boisterous, overblown flirtations of a best man who would never know better, Viktor sat back upright. He re-affixed his smile, his composure forced into place once more for the sake of simple necessity. "Excuse me while I scold someone who isn't you."

Viktor muted the screen of his original conversation, and leaned over to the opposite side of the couch. He lightly pet Makkachin's back while moving over him, towards Yuuri, so he could speak down more directly into Yuuri's phone.

"Chris, if he gets smaller, that means he's running from you! Though, please, come by! If you say that in person, I can tattoo my hand print on your face for him. With love, of course. Sweet, platonic love," Viktor answered back through that same, forcefully accommodating look he'd been wearing through his negotiations. With that attended to, he retracted himself, back to the other side of the couch. "Yes, sorry. Where I was."

Surprised but the reply, Yuuri watched Viktor turn back to his original conversation, a fake smile plastered on his face.

Chris's rich laugh drew Yuuri attention away from his fiancé and back to his conversation at hand. "Oh, it is so interesting to see Viktor jealous over your affections Yuuri~! What did we do without you all of those years?" Looking down at the device, Yuuri had to wonder if Chris was even surprised by Viktor's comment or if he only saw it as a challenge.

"Well, there you have it, Chris. I'm spoken for. You'll have to fight Viktor for me in hand to hand combat if you want a chance," Yuuri meant to joke.

The deep purr Yuuri heard back, alternatively, seemed to have interpreted his comment otherwise. "Oh~! So, there is still a chance for me! I'll have to start looking for flights to come and visit. I'll be seeing you soon, Yuuri~! Wait for me~"

Immediately, Yuuri's eyes drew even wider than they had at the start of the call. His hand shook around the phone. "No, Chris! I didn't-! That's not-!" Before Yuuri could get a word in, Chris hung up.

Releasing a heavy sigh, Yuuri closed his eyes and put his head back against the cushion behind him. He wondered when his life had gotten so dramatic, yet, the question only hung in his mind for a moment before he'd already turned towards the answer. Smiling to himself, Yuuri gazed back at his fiancé. If having an overly dramatic life was the price he needed to pay to have Viktor's love and affection, then Yuuri would gladly pay it ten times over.

The drama, at the moment, seemed to be focused on the surprisingly impassioned debate Viktor was now having on the phone. Without the context of what had lead up to this point, Yuuri could only speculate what had lead to Viktor's smile widening so much that it looked almost threatening.

"Well, would you be happier if the ISU put him up, which they already did, and tell the world for everyone to see that an already qualified grumbly kitten is being exiled by the FFKKR, because a man claims a tiny teenager said mean words to him while hurt and grieving? I know what papers will call him, then! The boy without a country! it'd have a nice ring for tabloids to complain about you, yes? Almost as nice as the ring I got from Yuuri! …no, not that Yuri. Yuuri."

Increasingly frustrated, or, at the very least, distraught, Viktor pressed the back of his palm over his head, subconsciously mimicking a pose he'd seen Yuuri using not long ago. "What? His last season— no, last competitive season—no. Yurio didn't skate then. Are you sure you—?" Eventually, after a good, solid silence on his part, Viktor was left with no other choice but to hang his head and agree to what he could get. He tried to sound cheerful, but, it rang a little more hollow than he meant to when he told her his thanks. "Spasiba!"

Surprisingly exhausted over what amounted to maybe five minutes at most, Viktor pulled his phone away from his ear. He glanced back to Yuuri, curious what he had missed, and, if possible, looking for a springboard on which to reframe what had just happened.

Yuuri tried to offer Viktor a hopeful expression, only for the smile to melt into confusion on Yuuri's part the second that Viktor opened his mouth. "Yuuri? Is Chris still hoping you'll be an alcoholic? Because, this maybe got worse, a bit. A large bit. Like, a snappy elephant."

"You know Chris has been wanting me to get drunk and recreate the 'banquet incident' for years. But that's beside the point. What's worse? Did the Federation reject Yuri's posting?" Yuuri asked.

Viktor raised his hand and flicked his wrist, swatting the idea away. "No, no, not that bad. They just wanted to… and they said he dropped out two seasons ago, so, they qualified him to start at the bottom. After shouting."

"You mean, start with qualifiers?"

Viktor snapped his fingers. "Exactly, yes."

Although Viktor had said this as if it wasn't that bad thing, it wasn't exactly great, either. Their estimated time line had been based off of the Grand Prix schedule, but, preliminary season started at least a good month earlier. "That would mean that he'd need to start competing in...four, maybe five weeks?" Yuuri guessed. The schedules were supposed to be set for prelims months ago, so, in a way, the FFKKR was still doing Viktor a favor if they were adding Yuri in to that schedule at all. Still, it was hard to hear it that way.

Viktor shook his head back. "Later, much later. Twelve to seven weeks. Probably seven. She said he called the former head to. What was it? Something with a rake and a porcupine?" Yuuri had no idea what kind of an insult could involve a rake and a porcupine but he was sure it was scathing coming from Yuri. "Anyway, probably seven."

Reaching over Makkachin, Yuuri outstretched his own arm across the length of the couch. He gently brushed Vitkor's cheek with his fingertips, trying to offer some form of comfort. "Seven weeks, it's not ideal. Do you think Yuri can pull it off?"

Viktor smiled back, the same sort of disingenuous showman's optimism he'd been using on the phone. "If he skates like the video, sure. All the non-rookie seniors qualify on other scores or go right to the cup, so, for the first one he basically just has to finish and not fall down."

It was a good point, or so Yuuri thought. Given the amount of muscle memory Yuri must have built up over the years, along with the fact that he hadn't grown enough for his center of balance to change, getting through a few qualifiers shouldn't be too hard for him – he'd just need to build up enough stamina to get through his routines.

"I think he can handle that. We'll just have to jump through a few hoops before we get to the real challenge. I'm not worried." Yuuri lied.

Not catching on to the shared disingenuousness, Viktors smile broadened all the more. "Exactly. Maybe he'll listen better if he loses, again. He did after you."

Smirking lightly, Yuuri nodded along. Viktor was probably right—nothing motivated some people like losing to someone they thought was beneath them. That, or it obliterated their confidence completely. In the past, Yuri had emphatically proven to be the first type. In that case, it might even be to Viktor's advantage if Yuri barely made it through his first national preliminary, because he'd apply himself all the more for the rest of the season.

Then, Yuuri remembered the look—or rather, the lack of a look—he'd gotten from Yuri at the rink just yesterday, before Yuri started cussing him out. There was still some piece of this puzzle, something that had changed with Yuri, that Yuuri and Viktor were missing.

He was worried, again.


	6. Chapter 6 - Icy Flakes

Chapter 6 – Icy Flakes

Yuri's first day back on the ice after his two-year hiatus went just as well as could be expected. Both Yuuri and Viktor agreed that it would be best to run Yuri through the basics, just to get him back into the rhythm of what should be second nature.

After the basic warm-ups had been completed, Viktor had divided the ice with a row of small, orange pylons. In the practical sense, they'd been placed there to guide Yuri through some of his drills. To Yuri, they'd looked, and felt, more like a quarantine. While Otabek had gone straight from warm-ups to rehearsing jumps and choreography, Yuri had been left to alternate between mat exercises and runs along the outer sliver of the rink. Although it was Viktor's job to coach them both, Otabek's practice was considerably more complex, so it was often delegated to one Yuuri to watch the other.

This hadn't been an ideal arrangement for either of them.

Overall, Yuri wasn't sure which part to be most frustrated with—the fact that he kept getting scolded for lifting his foot on the wrong beat of a basic chasse; that he'd, at one point, tried to imitate one of Otabek's jumps when Yuuri wasn't looking and partially somersaulted into the guard rail; or that when Viktor had gone to find him a chair to support Yuri during plyometric push-ups, the chair had been too tall for Yuri, and Viktor opted to borrow a recycling bin from the janitor for him, instead. Whichever the lowlight happened to be, he'd ate enough ice shavings and humble pie that he in no way wanted or needed dinner.

This, of course, did nothing to stop the inevitable. The day ended. With it, the shadow of the evening loomed.

When all was changed, said, cleaned and done, Yuri was left with little but a hollow stare and a slow trudge after Otabek out the door. Viktor, meanwhile, had left to retrieve something from the locker room. This had left Yuuri, alone, to finally feel the crushing weight of his exhaustion.

Releasing a heavy sigh, Yuuri plopped down onto the bleachers. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, almost as if he was praying to the fluorescent lights dangling overhead. If only Yuuri hadn't already made plans, he could have gone home, taken a nice long bath and cuddled with Viktor to wring the soreness from his soul. He supposed he'd have to settle for this moment and appreciate that, if nothing else, at least it seemed that he and Viktor would get some mutual solitude on the drive to Katya's.

Lost in reflection on the future trauma that was trying to train Yuri, Yuuri was so consumed by his own thoughts that he hadn't even noticed Viktor approaching.

Taking advantage of Yuuri's stare into the distance, Viktor slipped right past him. He lowered himself onto a bended knee directly in front of Yuuri's seat on the bleachers, striking the sort of pose that was most often associated with a prince trying a glass slipper on his Cinderella, or to propose. In the place of what would have been a shoe or a ring, Viktor instead raised up a steaming cup that would have traditionally been used to serve sake.

"Here! A gift, reward for, it says, a long, hard day from Chris!" Viktor gazed up at Yuuri with a smile, eagerly anticipating a spark of something other than a listless, lifeless stare into nothingness. His head tilted sideways in exaggerated contemplation. "He really does want you with a tie on your head, again, doesn't he? Interesting delivery boy he sent, too. Very insistent on not wearing pants."

One look into Viktor's eyes, and another down to the steaming cup, melted most of the fatigue and tension straight out of Yuuri. "A delivery boy with no pants, huh? Chris would do something like that, wouldn't he?" Yuuri asked without intending it as a question.

Viktor laughed lightly at anticipation of his own remark, intending, on some level, to denote that it was indeed meant as a joke. The mere sound of Viktor's muffled snickering drew a chuckle out of Yuuri, too. Before either of them had the sense to know what they were doing, they'd infected each other with shared laughter, any intended remarks lost in each others' presence.

With a quick sigh of contentment, or, at the very least, the newly regained sense to speak, Viktor took one of Yuuri's hands. He guided both to hold the warm cup, and watched on, waiting for the twinkles of good spirit to return to Yuuri's eyes. "I designate as driver, so, don't worry. Also, that's a tea! From me."

Understanding the joke Viktor had very badly tried to play on him, Yuuri wrapped his hands around both the cup of tea and the hands which had offered it. He quietly took a sip. Somehow, the warmth of the liquid coursing through him felt similar to a kiss—a warm, soothing, fleeting sensation spreading throughout his very being. With another sigh, this time in contentment, Yuuri nodded to Viktor in understanding. If there was ever a way he'd be ready to face going to dinner with Yuri's family, it was with Viktor at his side.

Out in the parking lot, Otabek had just situated himself on his motorcycle when an uninvited angry blond boy stepped directly into his path. Yuri's mop of a head had lowered, enough so that he was speaking more towards the Harley's headlights than to Otabek himself. "Take me. You impale us on a traffic light, no one expects our corpses at dinner."

If nothing else, it had gotten Otabek to pause. "You're really looking forward to this huh? And just think, you agreed to a foreseeable future full of it," Otabek's tone lightened on the last syllable, short of joking, but nonetheless amused.

It was a sentiment that Yuri didn't have in him to share. "What the hell makes you think I thought about this shit? Give me the damn helmet."

"You really didn't think they'd want to meet your family? That you wouldn't have to put up with family get-togethers? Embarrassing stories? Well, prepare yourself."

As requested, or, rather, demanded, Otabek reached to retrieve the spare helmet. Otabek had hardly started to lift the helmet from the side compartment before Yuri snatched it from his grasp. Yuri grabbed Otabek by the back of his jacket and climbed onto the bike. He shifted in place, deliberately facing in any direction other than Yuuri and Viktor's car.

"I'm keeping this."

The statement drew a look from Otabek. What, exactly, the fleeting flash of surprise was supposed to mean, he'd given no indication. He shook his head at whatever he'd been considering and revved the engine.

The drive to Yuri's house had, for the most part, passed in quiet. Otabek, having not been on the previous night's excursion, hadn't had the curse of wandering into Yuri's neighborhood yet, so occasionally, Yuri had to pipe up with directions or tell him to slow down.

Yuri did not, however, have to tell Otabek which house to stop at. In the daylight, the full impact of the single-story, worn brick, grey and green trimmed house could smash a passerby in the face. The front yard had a duct-taped, princess pink plastic pool cluttering the lawn, along with a rusty bike, some skateboards, and what ostensibly at one point may have been rose bushes, but now seemed more like exceptionally tall and thorny weeds. A little girl who couldn't have been more than four years old was sitting on the front porch with dandelion crowns in on hand and a glitter-glue-coated neon pink poster board in the other.

The second the girl spotted Yuri, she came running with a huge smile, her braids bouncing with the rest of her. "Dyadya Yura! Dyadya Yura!" Nina squeaked, her pitch somehow loud enough that not even the rumbling engine of the motorcycle could muffle her.

Over Otabek's shoulder, Yuri tried to mutter a final command as a courtesy. "Save yourself. Go. You caught a three-hour flu. Or sanity."

Smirking at the 'free pass', Otabek shook his head. He removed his gloves and his helmet while he observed in silent amusement.

Yuri hadn't even dismounted his leg from the bike before Nina's rainbow-glitter-coated hands had latched onto him. Yuri tried, and failed, to slide out of Nina's grip while he headed for the door. Nina's head rocked back to look straight up at him, aglow with interest. "Dyadya Yura! Where were you? Look, I made flowers!"

"Hell."

"Why?"

"Peer pressure from a dog and a pancake. What's it to you?" Yuri didn't even blink. He just dragged his feet towards the door, his leg barely lifting under the newfound weight of a tiny child.

Nina jostled the dandelion crowns. "Mamachka said to share. So, I made you flowers, too!" She dislodged one hand from Yuri's leg to flail one in Yuri's direction.

Yuri put his hand on top of Nina's, pushing her and the flowers away. He tried and failed not to huff while he wrestled with his key in the lock. "You don't make flowers, Ninochka. You grow them."

"Why's that?"

"Did you make goldilocks?" It was, as Yuri had totally failed to explain for context, the name of Nina's goldfish.

Nina shook her head. "Nuh-uh."

"Is she bigger?"

Seemingly confused, Nina stopped to tilt her head. "I dunno."

The front door, for all of his efforts, still wasn't budging, so Yuri stomped his foot in the side corner and tried the handle one more time. Finally, on the fourth violent shake, it popped open to reveal the cluttered front hall.

While Yuri had paused in the doorway, Nina reached up, nudging him with the flowers again. Her eyes sparkled back at Yuri, as eagerly insistent as ever.

Finally getting the memo, and, more importantly, noticing that Viktor and Yuuri were still far from sight, Yuri relented. He bent down on one knee, allowing Nina the chance to set the mangled crown of dandelions atop the helmet he hadn't bothered to take off.

Nina clapped her hands together in a cheer, too delighted not to burst with joy. "Yay! We match!"

Without the slightest change in his expression, Otabek reached for his phone. He snapped a few pictures of Yuri in his motorcycle helmet and dandelion crown while he was distracted by Nina. Then, Otabek shut the door.

The Yolkin house wasn't any more impressive from the inside than it had been out. If anything, the clutter was worse. There was a coat rack by the front door, yet it had been draped in yards upon yards of tea-dyed lace, while the actual coats had been flung on top of what may have been at one point long ago been a chair. From the plastic bins tucked under tablecloths and scraps of repurposed fabric at the side of the front hallway, it appeared that someone had, most likely recently, tried to tidy the house, which somehow only seemed to make the clutter all the more obvious.

At the center of what was usually a living room but was, evidently, a dining room for the night, one could see a very carefully decorated pair of card tables combined under a hand-embroidered table cloth. A centerpiece of dandelions in a mason glass jar rest in the middle. Name tags drawn in crayon had been set at each of the mismatched but nonetheless color-coordinating chairs.

A voice called back from the other side of the hall, out of sight but clearly recognizable as Katya. "Come in, everyone! I'll be there in a minute!"

Assuming that this was their hostess, Otabek tried to look to Yuri for further instruction. Before he could get any sort of guidance on where to go, Nina trotted to Otabek's side. "Hi! I'm Nina. I'm four. Are you winner?" She raised her glitter-dusted right hand, tucking her thumb beneath the rest of her fingers to signal the number four.

His attention firmly taken, Otabek took a knee as well, leveling himself with both Nina and Yuri. He opened his mouth with the intention of introducing himself.

Before Otabek could get through the first letter, Yuri puffed back on his behalf. "You mean Viktor? No. That's Otabek."

Yuri tilted his head, raising both of his hands to remove his flower crown. Instantly distressed, Nina slapped both of her hands over the flowers and Yuri's helmet, pressing the crown down. She pouted, her forehead creasing with an upcoming whine. "No! Stay! We gotta match for winner!"

"Who the flip is winner?"

Quietly fascinated, Otabek pulled out his phone again to take a video. Without direct evidence of what he was witnessing, Otabek had a feeling no one would believe him.

Out in the unnaturally cracked driveway, just past the bushes that may have seemed more in place in a desert than an urban neighborhood, two such people had just arrived.

The ride to the Yolkin house hadn't taken long, but, regardless, Yuuri had held Viktor's hand the entire way there. The time they'd spent exchanging notes about the day had passed far too quickly.

Viktor's hands tensed around the wheel. He raised one towards the windshield to point at the front of the house, calling Yuuri's attention. His expression had, at first glance, seemed to be positive, until someone listened past how he sounded when he spoke to the words themselves. "Ohy, khak— not good. It looked better when you couldn't see, yes? It's like a treehouse, but without the tree. Or an in-laws house for Makkachin," he pondered aloud.

As much as Yuuri knew he should have reminded Viktor to be more polite, in his own head, Viktor was more right than Yuuri could admit. Aside from the bricks, it really did look like an oversized tree house that had been evicted from its tree.

Yuuri shrugged. "Maybe it's nice on the inside?" was about all the encouragement he could muster.

Viktor bobbed his head along, pretending to accept the false enthusiasm as if it was genuine. He pushed off the wheel, back to attention, and plucked a rather sizable bouquet from the back seat. "Anyway, away this way!"

Yuuri trailed a few steps behind, a sense of lethargy already returning as he followed Viktor to the front door. Pretending not to notice this, Viktor knocked on the door with a polite, fake smile.

Drawn out of the ongoing battle between Yuri and Nina, Otabek opened the door with a firm yank. The second that it gave way, Viktor outstretched his arms with showy enthusiasm. "Good night, everyone! We're here."

Otabek looked back at Viktor and Yuuri, his usual stoicism breaking to show the smallest possible hint of a grin—perhaps the happiest look that anyone there had ever witnessed Otabek giving. "Welcome. You almost missed seeing Yuri in a flower crown."

As the front door swung open and Otabek's comment registered, Yuuri found himself smirking at the unexpected sight. Yuri was, indeed, wearing a flower crown. He was also being wrestled by Nina, who was, at that time, struggling to hold the crown on his head and otherwise clinging to Yuri at whatever angle she could.

The affectionate failed headlock Nina was trying to put Yuri in broke the instant she spotted a new target. "Huggy-Yuuri!" Using Yuri's head essentially as a spring board for herself, Nina pushed off Yuri. She darted past Viktor's leg, ignoring him entirely in favor of squeezing onto Yuuri."Hug attack! Pow!"

Although Nina spoke into his leg, Yuuri heard her loud and clear. Chuckling lightly, he looked to Viktor, who seemed equally surprised by the little girls' enthusiastic greeting. "Hi Nina, it's nice to see you too."

Freed from the grip of his tiny, sticky assailant, Yuri took the helmet off. He ran the back of his hand over his mouth and sputtered against it, brushing off the specks of glitter. He would have taken the second to wince at the fact he may have technically just coughed up a handful of sparkles were it not for the equally shining smile Viktor was sending back at him.

"And what a time to be on, it is!" Viktor bent over at the waist, offering his hand and, by extension, the bouquet, to Yuri in such a way that it technically wasn't so much an offer as it was a shove, thrusting the bunch of daisies and daffodils into Yuri's chest. "Here, Yurio! Look, you match it! Don't keep them, though, they're for our hostess."

Reminded all too strikingly of what had happened mere seconds before, Yuri could only think of one thing he wanted to say. Then, he'd spotted Nina in the corner, which left Yuri to shift his eyes aside in obvious discomfort. His shoulders raised, the rest of him briefly curling over in a shudder of some kind while he grumbled. "Like I would, maple fudging prick bush."

At first, Viktor seemed ready to make a comment on how vulgar Yuri was being around company. Then, he processed what he had actually heard, and his eyes closed under the weight of his teasing smile. "A, someone can clean your mouth, then! Good to know."

Sure enough, the glower that Yuri offered to Viktor had far less of an impact when he stumbled over the words to censor them. "Sentient ashtray. You just agreed with a four-year-old!"

"Why not? She has good taste." Viktor craned his head around Otabek, staring past the abject mess of the house in search of the other, expected faces he wouldn't recognize even if they were there.

Ignoring the exchange between Yuri and Viktor for the most part, Yuuri patted Nina's golden head affectionately. Nina, in turn, upped her snuggle game enough to nearly pull him to the floor. Yuuri caught himself along the wall, just in time to hear Viktor ask the question of the night "Where's your cousin? We should introduce ourselves off the phone."

Yuri scoffed towards the carpet. "Slaughtering the pig. We're encouraging porky's cannibalism." It was certainly an interesting way of saying they were having pork for dinner.

Yuri shoved off the ground, back up to his feet, with the bouquet under one arm and a twitching eye barely visible under his bangs. He stared down Viktor with increasing frustration. "Now give me your jacket. And yours," he turned to Yuuri, then Otabek, still glaring, "You get heat stroke, I'm not paying an ambulance."

Viktor put his hand on Yuri's head, both pulling his attention and pushing him down in the same gesture. "Be careful, Yurio. Say any more, someone might think you learned a manner, once."

Viktor picked the dandelion crown off the floor as he passed by, setting it, for a fleeting second, back into place on Yuri's head. That second only lasted as long as it took for Yuri to grab the crown and throw it across the room. It landed on the coat rack. At the same second as Yuri had been watching the flowers float away, Viktor took off his thin rain coat and draped it over Yuri's shoulder with a dramatic flourish as he passed by, strolling deeper into the house.

Yuuri took his phone from his coat's pocket, and then passed it towards Otabek. He had nearly forgotten about Nina's cuddle onslaught until she reminded him of her presence by tugging on his leg repeatedly.

Looking down at the little angel latched onto him, Yuuri smiled down in a sheepish kind of way, as if unsure what to do. Undeterred, Nina pulled him inside, away from the others. "Huggy-Yuuri! You wanna tour? Mamachka said people need tours. Or they don't know where to find stuff."

With no real recourse to resist an offer that cute, Yuuri found himself nodding along. "Sure. I'd love a tour. Maybe…"

Although Yuuri pointed towards the others on the word 'maybe', wondering, rightfully, if it would have made sense to invite everyone to go, he was given no chance to mention it. The instant he'd agreed, Nina had already started pulling Yuuri down the hall.

First, Nina veered into the living room, first, towards her pile of toys. She reached into her doll house to take out two plush birds. "This is Mimi! And that's Kiki! They're sisters, so they don't like each other but they love each other. Kiki's mean, though."

"That isn't very nice of Kiki," Yuuri agreed, as if he had even the slightest idea what she was talking about.

That was enough encouragement for Nina to nod emphatically. "I know!"

Nodding with interest, Yuuri's eye drifted towards the mantle, specifically towards the row of family photos lining the dusty brick shelf. As worn as the room was, the photos were as pristinely kept as they were varied. Among them, Yuuri could spot what he assumed was Nina's baby picture, a wedding photo of Katya with a middle-aged man Yuuri assumed was her husband, and a picture of that man with a child who appeared to be his son at the park. Hidden among them, there was an image Yuuri could recognize almost instantly, as if he may as well have seen it before. It was of a much younger Yuri and his doting grandfather. For once, Yuri was smiling, practically beaming with joy as his grandfather bent down to wrap an arm around him for the picture.

Although Yuuri meant to be listening to Nina, he took pause at the reminder that, once, even Yuri had been truly happy. To see Yuri, small and alight with the same sort of life that Nina had now, it planted a question deep in Yuuri's mind, one that didn't involve the baffling truth that somehow sweet little Nina and vulgar, frustrating Yuri were related to each other. What in the world had happened to make Yuri so bitter?

Whatever somber pondering that question would have led to was stopped by the pull on his leg. "Look, hurry! We've gotta finish! Or mamachka rings the bell!" Nina urged, as eager as she was flailing. Then, she pulled Yuuri out into the hall.

Hearing the commotion, Katya raised her voice over the stove's timer in her kitchen, to try and reach what she expected were her guests and not unusually cheerful robbers. "Yura! Is everyone here?"

Already agitated by everything else, Yuri snapped at the question essentially on instinct. "No. We couldn't fit the population of China. Yes, everyone's here!" He held his spot in the front of the hall, still waiting and watching expectantly for Otabek to hand over his coat. He couldn't have flattened his expression with more abject disgust if he'd been pressed into a human pancake. "Your phone, too. I'm calling a hit."

"You can have the jacket, but the phone stays with me. I need to record this momentous occasion as the only impartial person here," Otabek explained as he offered his leather jacket over to Yuri.

Yuri snatched the jacket from Otabek and turned in the same motion, pivoting on his back leg to stroll down the opposite side of the hall from Yuuri and Nina. "These are your moments, remind me in three decades to record your first colonoscopy."

Without either Yuuri to follow, Viktor had headed towards the voice of their hostess, leaving Otabek to his own devices. He paced around the house, acquainting himself with the layout before making his way back into the repurposed living room, and the living mystery of whatever happened to Yuri Plisetsky.

The house was well worn and lived in. The carpets had clear foot paths marked into them and were fraying on the edges. The walls looked like they could use a fresh coat of paint, and the living room could use a good dusting. But even with the overall clutter, while the house had a sense of fullness, it was also gave off an unexpected warmth.

Across the room, Otabek spotted a row of photographs lining the mantel of the fireplace. He drew closer to the frames, looking past the dusty edges with interest. The cluttered array of old and new photographs reminded Otabek of his own family back in Kazakhstan.

It took a good five minutes before Yuri had finally reemerged from Katya's workroom and the family office. The jackets had been stored, although their safety was arguable at best, considering how long he'd spent avoiding everyone. He stopped in the kitchen for only as long as it took to grab as many serving plates as possible before retreating to the living room.

Although Otabek heard footsteps pace into the room behind him, he stayed quiet, pretending not to notice, if only to see what Yuri would do unattended.

In the absence of anyone he was actively avoiding, Yuri set the table in silence. He turned each plate, folded the napkins, set the forks down, and, once every place was properly situated, even adjusted Viktor's bouquet so that both Nina's and Viktor's centerpieces were spaced at an even parallel. It wasn't until everything had been arranged that Yuri looked to the construction paper place settings marking each name.

Yuri's line of sight, and, by extension, Otabek's, both honed in on the current arrangement of who had been set where. Yuri's name tag rest directly between Yuuri and "Winner", who, by now, just about everyone had come to assume was a mangling of Viktor. From over his shoulder, Otabek watched as Yuri snatched the 'Yura' name tag and swapped it with the one across from him. Yuri paused for a second, considering the new set up, and then swapped again, putting Yuuri directly next to Viktor.

Arching a brow at this, Otabek turned the rest of the way to face Yuri directly. "Well that's interesting. I'd thought you'd be thrilled to sit next to him. Guess I was wrong."

Yuri's shoulders arched, his tension building along with his irritation at the accusation. He snapped his head away in annoyance. "Yeah, because I'd want some asshole kicking me while playing footsie with mister tall, dork and handsy and being coached on how to cut my fucking broccoli. What a joy."

Otabek turned back to the mantle, to pretend he hadn't noticed how oddly specific Yuri had been. He skimmed through the line of family photos until one in particular, caught his eye. There mere sight of it drew the soft hint of a curl at his lips into a full-blown smile. All five members of the household—Katya, Nina, Misha, Katya's husband and Yuri—were all posed together for a family portrait—and all of them were wearing matching ugly Christmas sweaters. Katya, Nina and her husband were absolutely beaming with joy at the center of the couch. Misha and Yuri, meanwhile, were wearing the exact same expression of disgust. It was hard to tell which of the two looked more miserable.

Immediately struck by how desperately this Christmas portrait needed to be shared, Otabek reached for his phone to take a picture for later use.

The instant that Otabek pulled out his phone, Yuri pivoted towards him. He took two, overly exaggerated strides to loom behind Otabek, reached over his shoulder and pushed the picture frame face-down on the mantle. "Take the sweater. It'll last longer."

Luckily for Otabek, he'd snapped the picture first. He chose not to mention that part when he smirked back. "Sure, I'll take it. I'd like to show it off as proof when people ask if this picture is photoshopped."

Rather than open up the potentially worse conversation that was the fact that Yuri knew exactly where to find that sweater, Yuri planted a flower crown on top of Otabek's head. Otabek nudged the crown into a better position. "Looks better on me anyway."

Yuri turned his back, trying and failing to end the conversation on a last dramatic word. "You want to help me dig my grave or keep working on yours? Dinner's almost ready. If you aren't too busy eating shit."

Elsewhere, Nina had successfully showed Yuuri through most of the house. She had poked her head in, momentarily, to show Yuuri the kitchen. Yuuri had waved to Katya and Viktor with the briefest possible "hello," before they were right back off again. Nina had also proudly displayed where mamachka did her work, where her brother Misha slept, and where Yuuri would go if he needed to 'make potty', as she'd put it.

When it had seemed that, in all of their running around, they had covered every conceivable square foot of the house, Nina stopped in the center of a dead end. With a snap of her fingers and a triumphant "ta-dah," she bounced up, waving towards the ceiling while she urged Yuuri to "Tug there! Tug there!"

Utterly confused as to what Nina could be talking about, Yuuri looked where she was waving. After a few moments of staring, he caught sight of a pale, thick cord with a small ball at the end of it dangling overhead.

With a firm tug on the cord, Yuuri opened the trap door, unfurling the set of folding stairs up to the attic. It was a sizable leap and a struggle for Nina, but, on the second hop, Nina managed to climb up the bottom stair. She scrambled up the rest of them in a mad dash, only stopping when she noticed that Yuuri had fallen behind to wave him towards her. "C'mon. You're slow!"

Following suit, Yuuri climbed the steps before poking his head up into the space above. He had no idea what she was looking for, but he couldn't exactly let a small child wander into an attic alone.

As he reached the top step, Yuuri was shocked to see that the storage containers and sheet-covered furniture that he'd expected to find in an attic was nowhere in sight. Instead, the attic space had been transformed into a bedroom. By the time Yuuri had stepped inside, Nina was already pointing towards a short rice lamp standing by the door. She kept pointing harder, if it were possible to point thin air with an increased amount of force. "Poke it! Poke it!"

It took a few seconds of repeating on her part and fumbling on Yuuri's, but soon enough, Yuuri managed to turn on the lamp. A soft, yellow light revealed the details of the cramped but homey space. There was an unmade bed with animal print blankets, naturally, and an antique desk with a laptop and school books spread about. The shoe boxes from the previous days' shopping trip were scattered across the floor, along with various articles of clothes. A small skylight was placed above the bed, giving a perfect view of the building sunset just outside.

"So, this is Yuri's room…" Yuuri whispered to himself, nearly forgetting Nina was there.

Nina put a single finger to her mouth in a standard shushing gesture. She winked back at Yuuri. "Yep, it's Dyadya Yura's room! But, shh! he gets loud if I'm here." She tilted her head for a moment, her own, haphazard dandelion crown nearly falling off the side of her face. Then, something caught her eye, and she ran off to fetch it.

Nina put her poster down in the corner, trading it for one of the books on the floor. She flashed the cover towards Yuuri, too quick for him to read it. "That's his books. They're long. I like mine more so we read mine." She put the book down, and pointed overhead, to a small, stuffed Siamese cat plush sitting at the side of Yuri's desk. "That's his bitty kitty. Her name's Patty. 'Cause she purrs if you pat her. See?" Nina reached to do just that, tapping the toy cat on its side. Sure enough, it made a sound, which Nina didn't stick around nearly long enough to see or hear. Instead, she'd ducked down under the desk, slid behind a chair, and pulled out what appeared to be an old shipping box with the label torn off. "Oh, and this is his shiny box!"

Although Yuuri had followed along with everything that Nina was pointing out to him, nodding to show he was listening, his attention fell adrift. Of everything in this room, by far the oddest part was the presence of a blanket pinned to the wall. At first glance, it was just a fabric picture of a sprawling Bengal tiger. Upon closer inspection, though, something seemed to be peeking out from behind it.

Curious as to what could be behind the tapestry, Yuuri raised the corner of the blanket to peek at whatever it was hiding. His breath pulled straight from his chest when he cast the fabric aside.

"Wow! You found his icy flakes already!" Nina's nose wrinkled as she took the one step back that the small, cramped space of the attic would allow her. "Dyadya Yura doesn't like to share them. But you should anyway. We're posed to share."

Behind the tiger tapestry was a collage of photographs, most of them in black and white, cropped into the shapes of snowflakes. A string of unlit white Christmas lights ran between them, the occasional lightbulb poking out, seeming to imply if not show that under the right conditions, the array could literally shine. Most of the snowflakes had been torn, tattered, and then taped back together again, as if, over and over, someone had tried to throw them out, yet they'd gone right back to where they were, strung on a wall somewhere not even the person who'd made them would see.

From afar, the collage merely gave the image of a snowstorm with brief flecks of blue and color. At the lack of a distance Yuuri was standing from it, however, he could see what the pictures were, specifically. Most of the photos, he recognized. There were a few from the Hot Springs on Ice event, images of them in the midst of their routines. Another picture was from the podium at the Rostelecom Cup. There was one from Junior Worlds, another from the Junior Grand Prix the last year Yuri had won. On and on like that, they went, excerpts of memories years past.

At first, Yuuri thought this must have been Yuri's way of documenting Yuri's skating career, a way of keeping mementos from a time when Yuri was happy. But, the more Yuuri looked, the more he realized that Yuri wasn't the focal point, here. In fact, Yuri wasn't even in most of the pictures. Yuuri was. There were press photos, Instagram excerpts, and stills of Yuuri in performances that had been broadcast on TV. There were even pictures Yuuri had never seen of himself before, of him drunkenly dancing at the Sochi Grand Prix Finals on that fateful, blacked-out night.

The more he stared in baffled wonder, the more obvious it felt to Yuuri. Either Yuri Plisetsky idolized Yuuri or he had a major crush on him.

A crushing voice chimed in Yuuri's head in protest. How could either of those possibilities be true? From day one, Yuri had acted like he hated Yuuri. They'd never seen eye to eye. Hell, their first encounter had involved Yuri screaming in his face about how worthless Yuuri was, and he should just retire. That wasn't how someone behaved towards a person they liked, was it?

But, this collage—something so intricate, put together with so much care—couldn't be made out of anything but some form of love or admiration.

As Yuuri continued to look at the collage, he noted the Christmas lights and the chord unplugged from the wall. Reaching down, he inserted the plug and stepped back to look at the piece in its full glory. The pure, antique white lights strung between the snowflake cutouts danced off of glass fragments along the wall, setting the attic aglow.

Nina clasped her hands over her mouth in awe, the reflections of the Christmas lights glowing off of her eyes with a gasp back at Yuuri. "Are you magic?"

Yuuri smiled down to Nina. He shook his head, and quietly took in the nearly sparkling glow of the artificial snowfall, enveloped in that befuddling epiphany that, under all of his insults and sneers, whatever it was that Yuri Plisetsky thought about Yuuri, it wasn't what he said. Under the veneer of hostility, there was something else, a feeling that could create something beautiful.

Suddenly feeling a bit guilty at snooping through Yuri's room and finding something that was clearly personal, Yuuri unplugged the lights and set the blanket back. When the lights went out, so did Nina's burst of extra happiness. Her lower lip stuck out, wrinkling with the disappointment that she wasn't getting her way.

Noticing the pout, Yuuri knelt to console her. He put a hand on her shoulder, pulling his attention to him. "I know, but they're Yuri's icy flakes, and we shouldn't disturb them. Let's not tell him that we found them ok?"

"But, why? they're pretty! It's not fair, they like you!"

Yuuri shook his head. He countered her shout with an empathetic whisper. "I think he wants to keep them a secret."

While Nina still looked unconvinced, she did stop to think. She looked from one wall to the other, considering her options, before brightening back up with a new idea. "You do the whirly birds too? Take me with you. I wanna fly, too." Then, she held out her right hand, extending her pinky finger. "Pinky promise?"

Extending his pinky finger, Yuuri hooked his gently with hers and shook it. "Super-duper, pinky-promise."

It didn't take much effort to put the room back in order. He tucked the so called 'shiny box' of Yuri's old medals back under his bed, rearranged the books, and turned off the lamp before helping Nina back down the steps. Just before Yuuri closed the door, his eyes drifted back to the tiger blanket and the surreal knowledge of what lay behind it. He could only hope that Yuri never found out he'd seen the pictures.


	7. Chapter 7 - Storge (Familial Love)

**Chapter 7 – Storge (Familial Love)**

"You have a lot on your plates. Please, let me take some off yours. At least two, maybe more. I've seen too many circuses not to juggle," Viktor offered, his inflection seeming to imply this wasn't the first time he'd spoken up about it.

Katya shook her head. "Thank you, but, no, you're a guest. Be a guest and we'll do the—wait, no, we just watched Beauty and the Beast yesterday," she paused halfway through the thought, blinked to attention, and turned to remove a tray of what appeared to be some sort of roll from the oven. She set them on the stovetop to cool. "And are you sure you don't want a drink?"

"Ax. Yes, I'm sure I don't. This, I see sober."

Back on the first floor, Yuuri heard the happy chatter between Viktor and Katya as they got to know one another. Yuri and Otabek seemed to be in the midst of some sort of skirmish over a family photo. By all accounts, it seemed that Yuri hadn't noticed that Yuuri and Nina had disappeared up into his room.

Blushing at the mental image of the pictures back in Yuri's room, Yuuri tried to distract himself from the photos and what they might imply. If they meant anything, it had to be just as admiration. They were rivals, or, had been rivals, after all. It made sense that way.

With that thought in mind, Yuuri tried to banish the blush on his cheeks behind a friendly smile. Stepping into the kitchen, with Nina close behind, he looked to their hostess. "Good evening Katya, thanks for having us over. Nina was an angel and gave me the grand tour. She's such a sweetie." He only hoped that Nina wouldn't mention she had shown them every room of the house.

Now that he was standing in the doorway, Yuuri noticed that, somehow, Viktor had ended up sitting on top of the countertop. Viktor swayed forward, towards Yuuri, when he spotted him. "Mlaya-ri, your kiddy kidnapper returned you, safe, and, with glitter chicken pox. Shining like the twinkle of my heart." He gushed on instinct, only for his face to flatline at the sight of Yuuri's expression.

Katya, lacking that sort of insight into the nuances of Yuuri's facial quirks, dismissed the pinkish hue of his complexion as merely being from the summer heat.

"Oh, no, thank you, Yuuri. This is nothing. Just a moment, my husband should be back and we'll be ready to go. Would you like a drink, first? We have pop, juice, water, some wine or beer."

"And milk! I like strawed-berries." Nina chimed in, implying if not actually giving her own drink order for dinner. She pointed around Yuuri's leg, over from him towards Viktor. "Mamachka! Mamachka! Is that Winner?"

Turning away from the meal, Katya set a hand on Nina's head and a comforting, restrained smile in her direction. "Ninochka, have you washed your hands? And you shouldn't point at people, ok? If you want to know who he is, ask him his name." Katya looked from Nina to Yuuri, or more specifically, towards the multiple hand prints of glue and rainbow glitter that were tracked across Yuuri's left leg. "I'm sorry, can I get those? You have a spot. Or, spots. Lots of spots."

Undeterred, Nina moved across the kitchen, towards Viktor's side. She pulled at his dangling leg, first, until he was staring down at her. "Hi, I'm Nina! Are you winner?"

Viktor leaned forward against his arms, bending as much as his back would allow him to from his already awkward position "Maybe. What would I win?"

Nina shrugged. "I dunno. What's your name? My name's Nina."

Nina raised her hands over her head, giving what, to a more little-girl-fluent observer one might have noticed was a universal 'pick me up' sign. Viktor, instead, slid himself a little deeper forward, putting his hand on top of Nina's head. "Ah. Then who's Ninochka?"

"Me!" Nina pressed her hand against her heart. "Ninockha is Nina! Mamachka says!"

With a puff of a laugh from his nose, Viktor slid down from the counter to the floor. He dropped to one knee and ruffled his hand across Nina's head. "Well, my name's Viktor. Is Viktor "winner", too?" He adjusted Nina's crown of dandelions, taking one of the loose strands out to tuck it behind his own ear. Midway through the gesture, he blinked to a realization of the potential redundancy of a victor being a winner. "Oh, is that how that happened?"

Leaning against the door frame, Yuuri crossed his arms over his chest and watched Viktor with Nina. It drew to mind fantasies of a future—their future—of what Viktor would be like as a father if they were to have a child one day.

Although momentarily distracted by both the finishing whistles and bells of dinner coming together, Katya still made a point of referring back to Yuuri. She stepped away from the pan of sauce she'd been stirring to pass Yuuri a dampened paper towel "I hope you don't mind dinner. After he left he kept mentioning pork cutlets. It seemed like it was sort of a thing? Though if anyone's vegetarian, there should still be enough pasta…" Sure enough, in a covered glass bowl far more intricate than one would've expected from the objectively shabby state of the kitchen, a watchful eye may have spotted a steaming container full of baked, parmesan-crusted pork cutlets.

For such a polite, innocuous statement, it shattered Yuuri's fantasies unexpectedly quickly. He tried not to look as uncomfortable as he felt while accepting the paper towel. "Pork cutlets are my favorite, actually. I'm surprised Yuri remembered," he lied as smoothly as he could muster.

By some mercy of the universe, at that moment, the front door rattled open. The middle-aged man from the photographs on the mantle took a deep breath as he stepped inside. "Something smells wonderful!"

A few steps behind him, Misha marched in, his unenthused stare draining whatever life from the air he could. He dropped his bags in silence and disappeared. The husband, meanwhile, headed straight towards the present company in the kitchen.

Being the closest to the door, Yuuri outstretched his hand to the man in greeting. "You must be Katya's husband. It's nice to meet you, I'm Yuuri Katsuki."

The man not only accepted the hand, but shook it with unexpected aplomb. "Yuuri! I've heard so much about you, it's nice to meet you! My name's Simon. It's—"

Simon turned his head, expecting to say something to Viktor. Whatever it was, he was interrupted by Nina bouncing away from Viktor, straight into Simon. "Papachka!"

Smiling wide, Simon leaned down to scoop Nina up into his arms. He showered her with little kisses in between admiration. "Hello my little Ninochka! You look beautiful today!" Nina giggled happily and hugged Simon around his neck, clinging to him as snugly as possible.

When Simon finally paused, Nina waved towards the flower crown askew on her head. "Thanku! I grew flowers, papachka! Look!"

"They're very impressive!" With a step forward, Simon looked to the rest of their company. "And you must be Viktor! It's nice to meet you. Yuri's told us a lot about how you two skated together back in Russia."

The glow of success and amusement had, entirely unintentionally, also rubbed off on Viktor. "Yes, I am winner." Viktor's smile spread so wide that his eyes shut, radiating a genuine amusement over what had happened moments ago. "She renamed me."

One handshake later, Simon turned to the last person in the room. He wrapped his Nina-free arm around Katya's waist and kissed her neck. "I missed you my kitty-Katya."

Distracted from the pot on the stove, Katya looked up at Simon as if to chastise him for his behavior in front of guests. Before she could say anything, Simon pecked her on the lips.

Watching all of the intimacy in the kitchen made Yuuri yearn for some of his own. While he hesitated to move too far, slowly, Yuuri took a few steps deeper into the kitchen, until he was directly at Viktor's side. He stepped into Viktor's arms and pressed a loving kiss against him.

There was no moment of thought, only reflexive instinct, a magnetism that instantly pulled Viktor's arms around Yuuri. Viktor's eyes shut, envisioning both this exact moment and a face that he no longer needed to watch to see in perfect clarity. He could go blind in the next second, and Viktor would always still see Yuuri. He knew it, in the bottom of his soul and the warmth passing across his lips, that to hold Yuuri was to hold happiness itself, and know that even if so many men had known love before, it could never be the same as this.

Pulling back, Yuuri released a small sigh. He rest his forehead on Viktor's shoulder as he whispered to him. "I love you, Vitya."

Viktor held his hands steady on Yuuri's back, supporting him. "A, lyuuribimoj. The only ways you say it more, are the ones where you don't say anything." Viktor's warm breath brushed Yuuri's ear and rustled his hair, lightly tickling him. A shiver that had nothing to do with cold, trailed down his back before settling at the base of his spine. "If you need to talk, we could go pretend we smoke. Like a slow, terrible suicide pact. Of love." What Viktor meant was that if Yuuri needed to share whatever was so clearly weighing on his mind, Viktor would find a way to get them some privacy.

Although Yuuri wanted nothing more than to have a moment alone together, he didn't want to be rude. Leaning back a bit to look up into Viktor's gaze, Yuuri shook his head. "I'll be alright for now. But thank you Vitya, it was a sweet, if strange idea."

A bit of the tension that had come over Yuuri washed away as they stood like that, just holding one another. Everyone in their bubbles of affection had been so lost in snuggles and kisses that none of them had noticed Yuri approaching the entranceway.

For what should have been the least shocking display of affection in history, one glimpse of Viktor and Yuuri in their little corner sent both an unwelcome tingle to Yuri's lips and a shudder up his spine. In that first, torturous second, his eyes stayed wide, nearly entranced. Then, he snapped his head aside. With his eyebrows sharpened in an overt, almost snarling mask of aggression desperate to cover the rush of blood to his cheeks, Yuri snatched a serving dish off the counter.

It wasn't until Yuri had snapped at him that Yuuri even noticed Yuri was there at all. "Eat me. Or dinner. Your pick, piglet," Yuri snarled on his way out the door.

Yuuri tried to catch a glimpse of Yuri, if only to sense what in the world had just happened, yet before he could, Yuri had already marched off. With an internal sigh, Yuuri lowered his head back to Viktor's shoulder, deliberately trying to tune out any commotion in favor of cuddling with Viktor.

As Yuri marched through the hallway, he pushed straight past Misha, who had been hiding from company along the wall. The irritated shout from before had been enough to draw Misha's eyes away from his phone. Misha, too, ducked into the kitchen, retrieving a dish of mixed vegetables. He followed Yuri to the table, if only so he could verbally jab Yuri's back without anyone but Otabek around to hear. "Does everything out of your mouth sound like you're hate-trolling for hookers in the library or is that special for us?"

Yuri slammed the pot down on the table, rattling the flowers. He stretched his stride, intentionally encroaching on Misha's personal space to hover straight over him. "What hormonally psychotic raging dumpster fire told you to find hookers in the library? Fact check your insults before you copy them off your phone, dickhole!"

Misha sneered back, seemingly offended but not giving way. "Dick-hole? What, did Google Translate get Tourette's?"

At that point, Yuri and Misha had yelled loud enough for Katya to be pulled out of Simon's embrace. She poked her head down the hallway after them. "Misha! Yura! Language!"

Both Misha and Yuri paused what they were doing to snap at Katya in what was, completely unintentionally on both of their parts, perfect unison. "It's English!"

— **\- - -**

It wasn't long after that before the family gathered around the two, matching card tables and color-coordinated if mismatched bouquets. Each face had taken the spot to match its place card, essentially dividing the table down in two, with Katya and her family towards the head, and Viktor and the guests at the foot of the table.

Taking his seat next to his fiancé, Yuuri continued to hold Viktor's hand, refusing to let go until the last possible second. The parmesan crusted pork cutlets were a far cry from Yuuri's mother's pork katsu, but they were delicious in an entirely different way. Yuuri found that he was so focused on his food that he'd hardly noticed the tension. Viktor, meanwhile, hadn't been able to feel anything but.

The entire time they were sitting there, Yuri hadn't once let a moment pass when he hadn't either been or had been appearing to be chewing. Although Viktor and Yuuri were theoretically Yuri's guests, he hadn't once looked at Viktor. While he had kept stealing glimpses at Yuuri, it was less in the way of concern or curiosity than it was aligned with how a paparazzo might sneak pictures in of their target in a crowd; aggressive and pointed, yet fleeting.

Katya kept her hands folded, her fingers tensing around the napkin in her lap while she waited for someone, anyone, to make a noise that wasn't their fork weakly sawing through a carrot. She looked to Yuri, specifically, who ignored her silent pleas in favor of radiating rays of misery. Misha's fingers clicked at the screen of his phone, the clack of typing forming the only sound in the otherwise quiet room.

"So. I. Well." Katya opened her mouth before she'd known what she meant to say, only to stall out in hesitation when confronting the silence. "…Does anyone need another drink?"

"No, thank you, I can only drink one glass at a time." Viktor answered, his interviewing smile firmly in place. Katya smiled back at him, appreciative and unable to tell the difference.

Having caught on to the chance in tone, at least a little, Nina waved her hand across the table for her step-father. She outstretched as far as her seat would allow in an effort to grab his sleeve. "Papachka, papachka. Huggy-Yuuri's said he's gonna teach me to fly, too!"

Wide eyed, Yuuri felt a jolt of alarm move through him for a moment. He prayed Nina didn't bring up the reason why he'd promised her he'd teach her 'how to fly'. Viktor turned the forty-five degrees needed to be watching Yuuri straight on.

Although most of the table seemed confused by this, Katya merely bobbed her head encouragingly. "Well, that's very nice of him, isn't it?" Katya set her fork down before she could take another bite, waited until it seemed that Nina was almost exclusively facing Simon, and turned to mouth the words at Yuuri in the most exaggerated, easily comprehensible attempt at a lip read possible. 'You don't have to.'

Viktor reached for Yuuri's hand under the tablecloth, trying to call his attention and ask a silent question, if this was what had been on his mind.

Looking from Katya, to Nina, to Simon and then to Viktor, Yuuri shrugged a shoulder, shrinking down with a sudden onset of bashfulness at becoming the center of attention. "I've been thinking about trying my hand at coaching and I've discussed the possibility of taking on younger students, with Viktor." Squeezing Viktor's hand under the table in reassurance that, no, this wasn't the source of his anxiety, Yuuri turned his attention from Simon and Katya to Nina once again. "I think Nina would be the perfect candidate to be my first student, granted that she is still interested once I'm ready to begin."

Perking up, Nina practically bounced in her chair with a giddy smile. "Why not now? I can, now." Otabek nodded approvingly at Nina, who raised her fork and her fingers into a thumbs-up back at him.

Katya shook her head. She reached to brush Nina's cheek with a napkin, wiping away a bit of stray tomato sauce. "Because, he'll need to sleep, Ninochka. So do you."

Before Katya could get the smudge, Nina shook her head with an adamant, "Nuh-uh."

That particular question having gone at least partially answered, Viktor then allowed his attention to shift towards the reason they were all there. With all of his usual nuance and subtlety, Viktor leaned against his hand and posed the question straight to Yuri's face. "So. Yurio. Every time I say your name, you plow more food in your mouth. Did you change your mind on competing and instead decide to turn into a flying teacup piggy, or is there something you don't want me to say?"

The mere idea that anyone could mistake petite Yuri for a piggy, in any sense of the word, made Otabek smirk with open amusement. Yuri dropped his fork against the plate with an audible clink, nearly coughing on the small bite he'd taken before he could shout back. "Who the hell'd get fat off zucchini?"

"That's—"

Rather than give Viktor the chance to explain or, worse, ask anything specific of him, Yuri turned to the one person in the immediate vicinity who hadn't appeared preoccupied with their own conversations or hating him. "Otabek, why train at the car graveyard?"

The move to get the conversation away from himself was even more transparent than most windows, but, it was a question Otabek didn't mind answering. He finished the sip he'd been taking from his water and shrugged. "Yuuri already had a few contacts here to get us a place to practice, the housing is affordable and it was a neutral area that we all needed to move to. It was a win-win situation, really."

"There's no win until the podium," Yuri snipped, openly dissatisfied with the answer. Otabek merely smiled, winked, and went back to his water before Yuri could try distracting them again.

Without missing a beat, Viktor adjusted himself so that he was facing their overwhelmed, anxious hostess with a beaming smile. "Katya. How are you related to Yurio, exactly? He's too busy ignoring me to say," he asked, the deliberate, intuitive showmanship on his part making it that much more challenging to tell that it wasn't as innocuous a question as it sounded.

Having heard her name, Katya returned Viktor's attention. "Ah. Well. We're second cousins. Or first cousins, once removed? I get confused which is which, but, his great-grandfather is my grandfather, so, like that?" her head naturally drifted into a tilt as she tried to recall.

Viktor's head tilted, too, at least for the start of the story. He pointed across the table, towards her. "And you're his guardian? He was sixteen when he came here, yes? Someone had custody."

The moment Viktor asked the simple question, Yuri shot upright and stabbed into the center of a pork cutlet. Katya, who had been taking a sip of water, stopped mid-gulp. Her body language retracted, all but folding into herself with the instinct to retreat from something that she wasn't sure how to deal with. With a tremble in her hand, she reached under the table, to press her quivering palm against Simon's knee.

For a moment, Katya and Simon locked eyes, holding a silent conversation through expressions alone. Having reached some sort of a conclusions, Simon looked down the table, towards Viktor, and answered instead.

"Well, after Yuri's grandfather passed away, he was with his mother for a while. But when Katya accepted my proposal, we both decided that it would be best for her and Nina to move here to Detroit. I'm a tenured History Professor at the University of Detroit Mercy, so, it made a more sense for the girls to move here since I have such a stable job, rather than me moving to Russia. Not that I would have minded." He said with a loving smile as he looked back to Katya. "Yuri was a big help preparing for the move. He helped us pack up a lot of the belongings and sold what we couldn't bring. Once we were ready to move the girls, I asked if he wanted to come along for a vacation, just to get away for a bit and take his mind off things. He's been living with us ever since, and now that he's eighteen, he's a legal adult."

It was a reasonable explanation for why Yuri was in the U.S. and how he'd gotten here, but something had been left implied, not stated. Yuri had come here to visit two years ago, and he'd never left.

"Where-" Yuri, wanting to change the subject no doubt, turned to ask Otabek something just as Viktor spoke up as well.

"Ax, I hear, then. He ran away!" If the tension in the room had truly been as thick and palpable as it had felt, Viktor's words would have been the knife, straight through it.

Yuuri gasped at the words. He turned to Viktor, expecting to scold him for his brazenness at insinuating such a thing, only to spot the expressions around the table weren't taken aback with offense, but with panic.

At first, Yuri had been left too stunned for recourse. The fork he'd just been about to take an angry bite from slipped straight out of his hand, falling to his plate with an audible clink, the sound which was only masked by the sound of his cousin hiccupping loudly. Katya pressed her palms over her mouth, somewhere between anxious, shocked and possibly nauseous. Yuri gripped the edge of the card table and pushed himself forward, knocking the edge of the admittedly flimsy surface into Viktor's chest. His eyes stayed widened with alarm, his mouth falling agape, and yet, he couldn't justify himself.

With a nonchalance that Yuuri envied, Otabek turned to look at Yuri. "I guess that means you'll have to get married so you can get your green card. I'd volunteer, but..." he reached for his water.

It took Otabek's interjection to send a jump start to Yuri's brain, setting him up with something he did, at least somewhat, know how he could argue back against. "I have a student visa, you pri—"

At the same instance that Yuri had started to speak, Nina bounced up in her chair as well. "Wedding? I can get flowers!" She raised both of her hands overhead, cheering the one part of the conversation she had managed to understand.

Yuri paused partway through his sentence, both because he'd been spoken over, and because he was suddenly reminded mid-insult that he was currently next to a four-year-old. His shoulders shrunk back, a huff settling in while he corrected himself. "—prince of Jerkoffistan." Yuri shifted his focus back to Otabek, away from Viktor, his initial indignation dulled to the point of a dry huff. "You and your hypothetical rescinded pity proposal can go up a butt."

Sneering at the comment, Misha still didn't bother to look away from his phone before throwing shade across the table. "Whose, yours?"

Yuri raised his left foot across the way and shoved it into the leg of Misha's chair, abruptly and forcefully pushing Misha backwards without raising a hand. "I'll waterboard your Pokemon in nail polish remover while you sleep, you pseudo-soul-less piece of sewer scum, I swear to whatever hell you believe in. Next time you blink, pray you're there and not with me."

It was all that Yuuri could do at that point to lean back and watch the train wreck spiral further off track. He took another bite of the parmesan pork cutlet, if only so no one could drag him into the chaos directly.

"But why? I'd like Dyadya Oatmeal. He likes flowers, too." Nina waved at Otabek's head, then set her hand back to her own head, signaling that she had noticed the crown, and yet had also failed to recognize it was the one she'd given Yuri earlier.

Too preoccupied with Nina to have noticed Misha and Yuri at each other's throats again, Katya set both of her hands gently on her daughter's shoulders, nudging her back down in her seat. "That's. Ninochka. Sweetie, I don't think Oatmeal's his name. Do you want me to cut your little trees?" she asked, holding enough calm that Nina bobbed her head and settled down while Katya cut her broccoli.

Hiding the extra pull at his smile from hearing what he thought may have been a small child renaming Otabek to "Oatmeal", Viktor reached further across the table. From their current distance, Viktor couldn't quite comfortably reach over to pat Yuri on the shoulder, but he waved at him with enough enthusiasm to impart the same impression. "All asides beside, there's no need for more cards, green or wedding. We've signed every paper with the FFKK. He's already registered to skate with his motherland, good as old. Or, new. Good as good."

As much as Yuri had meant to not pay attention, the mention of the FFKK made him turn his head. The sentence was so mangled, he was left with little but a flat, disbelieving sort of inquisition of "What." The 'the hell' was implied.

The air around Viktor might as well have sparkled with fireworks as he rose from the seat, arms outstretched and raised overhead in a victory pose. "Merry happy last three birthdays, Yurio, from Yuuri and I to you!"

As much as Yuuri meant to stay out of it, he tuned back into the conversation in expectation of some form of gratitude on Yuri's part for all of Viktor's help, and maybe a little bit of thanks to Yuuri, too. Instead, Yuri had been so stunned, the first words out of his mouth were an instant, instinctive, dull and dispassionate sort of sarcasm. "Pick an adjective, durachok."

The wash of white over Yuri's complexion said more about his disbelief than his words could have hoped to. One look at his eyes, still agape for an entirely different reason, locked in a muted, stunned state of disbelief.

Seeing or at the very least sensing this change in tone, Viktor couldn't help but to smile wider in teasing. "What strange English you've learned. I've never heard that as a thank you. Do you need an English tutor, too?"

Instead of taking the most obvious hint to express genuine gratitude that one could be given, Yuri just scoffed. He rose from his seat and pointed over his shoulder, towards the kitchen. "Whatever. Thanks. For invading my house and bossing me around. What, you want a pastila?" he'd quipped, the words dripping with what Yuuri couldn't help but hear as unwarranted sarcasm.

Viktor seemed to take the question at face value and answered accordingly. "Why not? That sounds delicious."

To everyone's amazement, Yuri hadn't said something else infuriating back at Viktor. Instead, he'd turned around and left the room. Where he'd gone, exactly, Yuuri didn't care. What Yuuri did know was that if he didn't leave right this instant, too, he'd say something he'd regret.

Releasing Viktor's hand, Yuuri pushed his chair back. Placing his napkin on the table, he glanced up before speaking. "If you'll all excuse me, I think I need some air." Without making eye contact with anyone—not even Viktor—Yuuri rose from his seat. He headed straight through the front door, into the yard, closing the door behind him, leaving everyone else inside.

Although it was a hot, humid night, Yuuri barely felt it. The moment that the ring of silence filled his ears, a twinge of the tension left him, but it wasn't much. He had half a mind to walk down the street and just head home, but that would only cause more drama.

Groaning in exasperation and fatigue, Yuuri hung his head. He crouched along the front steps, huddling into himself. Everything weighed down on him like sacks of sand on his shoulders. He tried to think of something, anything, other than how badly he wanted to smack Yuri across the face, scream at him and make him realize all that Viktor was sacrificing to help him—and by extension, everything that Yuuri was giving up to let Viktor do it.

The more he dwelled on it, the more unsteady Yuuri's breathing became. He gasped in the humid air, the weight lingering in his lungs, wondering why the hell he had agreed to let Viktor coach Yuri in the first place. What the hell had he expected? That one hidden art project on Yuri's bedroom wall meant he was a different person? As far as Yuuri could see, Yuri was nothing but an ungrateful, spoiled child who expected everything to be handed to him.

At that exact moment, all that Yuri could see was the refrigerator door.

Yuri could hardly remember his own feet moving under him to bring him into the kitchen. One moment, he was watching the dinner table, and the next, he was face to face with crayon drawings, report cards, and a collection of magnets in the shapes of My Little Ponies. He kicked the fridge open from the bottom and stared blankly inside, taking in the array of green and purple cubes of pureed fruit and honey, dusted with powdered sugar that were the apple and plum pastila he'd made at dawn. He stood there, alone, alert and yet distant, for no other reason than an inability to process the collision of his current and former lives. Already, his bones ached. There was a soreness between his thighs that he'd nearly forgotten was possible. Training this afternoon, even with insultingly basic exercises and falling on his face, it was like trespassing in someone else's dreams.

Viktor was the master of beautiful, broken promises. As Yuri knew far too well, Viktor saying that he would do something had about as much worth as Monopoly money in a grocery store. Until now, there'd been no guarantee that anything Viktor claimed would happen was true. For him to announce Yuri was officially registered so cavalierly, to so clearly imply Viktor had followed through on what he'd said he would do, it was different, palpable, real. A tremor of anticipation pulsed through Yuri's hands as he reached out, shaking his grip on the crystal dessert tray.

In the same sort of reverie, Yuri paced back down the hallway, towards the remaining group. He came to just as sudden of a stop in the living room archway, to the sight of a crowded table with one fewer, striking face.

With a very deliberate turn of his head, Yuri made the choice to pretend he hadn't noticed Yuuri's absence. It was such a forceful, intentional act to do so that it was the very definition of over-compensating. He dropped the tray unceremoniously onto the table. "Here. Eat it. Or chuck it at Makkachin. I don't care, just take them," Yuri muttered at Viktor.

Drawn out of his own concerns over Yuuri, if only for that second of rattling below, Viktor glimpsed back to Yuri with genuine curiosity. "You found pastila in two minutes?" he asked, the implication of his expectations masked by shared knowledge between them. It took at least eight hours for most recipes to set, and the cubes had been not only cut, but decorated with a beautiful, if peculiar, array of sprinkles and swirls.

Yuri tried to keep a dour face, yet he ended somewhere between a scowl and a mocking smirk. "Yes, Viktor. I time traveled to make you pastila." The sarcasm was obvious.

Rather than continue the argument, Viktor picked the tray up off the table—not just a piece, but the entire tray. He carried it level with his shoulder under his flattened right palm, careless and composed. Yuri's hands balled at his side, his shoulders scrunching as he watched Viktor stroll right past him to the front door. "Where the heck are you going?"

When his free hand brushed the handle, Viktor merely grinned. "Oh, nowhere, to steal air and share my pastila." He gave a quick wave as he slipped out the door.

Too taken aback to know what to do, Yuri pulled up his hood. He collapsed into his seat, attempting and failing to hide an unusually befuddled pout.

Safely outside, and with a somewhat limited amount of context to work with, Viktor descended the front steps and rounded the dried grass and pink plastic pool alike. He tread through the weight of the humid summer air, until his fading shadow, dull in the sunset, brushed over Yuuri's back.

"Yuuri, I brought dessert, and my shoulders," Viktor called.

Sure enough, the chime of Viktor's voice broke through Yuuri's internal monologue of everything that he'd ever wanted to chastise the little Russian Punk for, but never had. Turning to his fiancé, Yuuri felt his frustration give way to relief, and then, a surprising amount of confusion. He pointed towards the tray of funny looking cubes, increasingly uncertain. "Are you sure that's dessert? It looks more like something Nina would use as building blocks," he noted.

Viktor nodded through Yuuri's question, just the once, but it was a convincing bob all the same. "Pastila. It's like, a honeycomb marshmallow, except, not entirely that."

Still skeptical, but accepting, Yuuri took one of the cubes from the tray. He pinched it quizzically for a few seconds before hazarding a small nibble. He raised his eyebrows as the flavor settled in, sweet, light and subtle. "It's surprisingly good."

Content that Yuuri was back at something approaching contentment, Viktor took one of the cubes as well. They ate together in a few moments of silence, with Viktor eyeing Yuuri every so often to make sure that his head was still in place.

On the third glance over, Yuuri's eyes locked with Viktor's own. He broke away from his nibbling to fiddle with the piece of pastila, moving it in little circles as he spoke. "I'm sorry I left like that. I just-" Stopping before he said something potentially uncouth, he cleared his throat and looked down, focusing on the odd little cube in his hand. "I just didn't want to say something that I might regret later, so I opted not to say anything at all."

Whether it was out of concern, the need to be near him, or both, Viktor moved closer to Yuuri, his body hovering close as he reached out with his free hand. Looking up at him, all Yuuri could bring himself to do was shrug.

Back in the house, everyone had fallen into silence. For a moment, no one dared to speak, as if most of them were still waiting to see what else could go wrong.

Willfully ignoring the tension in the hope that would make it go away, Otabek looked down the short distance from his end of the table to his hosts. "Well, I don't know about the dessert, but the dinner was fantastic, Katya. You really know your way around the kitchen." He smiled with restraint, the expression subtle to the point it was hard to spot. "I'd offer to cook you a meal in return, but I think that might insult your taste buds. In any case, I'm glad I was invited, even if I wasn't expected."

Taken upright if not aback by the sudden compliment, Katya nodded. "Thank you, Otabek. It's nothing, really." She tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, trying and failing to mask the ever-growing urge to fidget. "With flattery like that, I doubt you'd insult a soul. Especially not me. I guess, feeding us compliments is more than close enough. Though, I wouldn't know about dessert, either. Yura made it."

Yuri hunched over his place setting, his bangs obscuring his expression, having suddenly started to bare far more resemblance to a soggy mop than a person. For all of his outward lack of liveliness, he still managed to sound defensive when he deflected the attention. "So did Nina."

Hearing her name, Nina pulled away from her plate. "Yep? What did Nina?"

Weakly smiling at the scene to her side, Katya leaned a bit further forward, turning her focus back to Otabek. "It's no trouble for us, though, really. My favorite things, I've found, they've never been the expected. It's the surprises that embrace us, and form who we are." Each movement more hesitant than the last, Katya slowly rose from the table. She ran both of her hands against the front of her skirt, flattening it out while she referred to the group. "If you'll excuse me, I'll just be a second."

Be it by design or sheer luck, Katya was given a good distraction to get out of the room by Nina, who had, at that same moment, taken to pointing at Otabek's flower crown. "Are those Dyadya Yura's flowers?" She tried to wave her hand directly across Yuri, to reach over and grab Otabek's flowers from him. "Why'd you have his flowers?"

Before she could do any more prodding, Yuri reached across the table to grab Nina by the shoulders and push her down. He stared flatly down at her, as unenthused as possible. "No. They grew from his head."

Katya hoped, had anyone paid attention to her timing, that they would suppose she'd simply gone off to use the bathroom. She paced through the hallway, out the back door, and circled the house, following the muffled, boisterous sound of Viktor's voice into the front yard.

In the time it had taken for Katya to make it outside, Viktor had bent onto one knee in front of Yuuri, and wrapped both arms around Yuuri's shoulders. From the distance Katya was standing, it seemed that the two of them were curled together like two puzzle pieces ready to interlock, hardly a millimeter and a millisecond away from an intense embrace.

Katya took an extra step away. Her words sputtered out of her, tense with hesitation. "Am I interrupting? Uh. No, that's dumb, of course I'm interrupting, you're engaged. And alone. With each other," she stuttered to correct herself.

Although it wasn't untrue that she had indeed walked into a private moment, Yuuri turned towards her, intending to assure her that she hadn't disrupted anything important. Before he could voice this, Viktor turned his eyes, but not his head, to her, instead. He held his position perfectly, the tips of his fingers having drawn so close to the space under Yuuri's chin that Yuuri felt the graze radiate without actually being touched, and answered her without hesitation. "Yes. We're about to make out in this puddle pool. Go on, it's fine, I think. Is it fine?"

When Viktor referred to him, Yuuri's eyes had snapped open. He had to assume that Viktor was joking, and yet, with someone else around to hear such a ridiculous suggestion, Yuuri coughed on the air he was supposed to be breathing. "It's fine, Katya," Yuuri struggled to speak up past the shock of supposedly making out in a kiddy pool, of all places. "I was just reassuring Viktor that I was alright."

It seemed that was all that Katya needed to hear. Slowly, but steadily, Katya drew closer to the both of them. She outstretched a shaking hand towards Viktor, her fingers tensing around the outline of a crumpled envelope. When she brought herself to speak again, it was a strained whisper, crackling under the pressure of daring to speak. "I know, he has his heart set on this, now. On you two. So, please, take this. For the first week, at least, and the skates." She pushed the envelope into Viktor's palm.

Viktor, naturally, looked down to check what was in his hand. In this case, it was the other kind of check, written for one thousand dollars. From the state of Katya's house, and what she and her husband seemed to do for a living, it stood to reason that this was a substantial amount of money to them. However, this didn't seem to register with Viktor, who merely accepted it with a smile and an honest, chipper observation. "Ah, this is, very little, yes."

For the second time that evening, Yuuri nearly smacked himself in the face over something that Viktor had said. "Viktor…" Yuuri hissed, trying to keep his tone low. When Viktor turned to look down at him, Yuuri whispered, "you're doing it again."

It hadn't been until Yuuri called him by his regular name that Viktor's awareness of his own actions started to sink in. Viktor's head tilted ever so slightly askew, for a second, as if considering how, exactly, what he said must have been inappropriate. Rather than dwell on the why, however, he simply settled on accepting that Yuuri was right.

"A, yes. Sorry. My mouth speaks before my brain," Viktor tried to apologize to Katya, not that she seemed to hear it by then. She was too busy bowing her head and babbling over him.

"I'll get the rest, I promise," Katya's hands clutched at the front of her skirt, twisting the fabric until her knuckles turned white. "I know how important your time is, especially, when you already have that nice young man to look after, but, I'll get it, so, please, don't mention it to Yura. Just, take care of him. I'll handle the cost, I swear." Although it seemed she was trying to insist, her anxious scramble for the appropriate phrasing instead made her words sound far closer to a full-on plea.

As Katya looked between the two of them, Yuuri felt even more of his frustration dissipate. He didn't know why Katya was so adamant about this, or why she wanted to help Yuri so badly, especially after his behavior, but he knew that he couldn't refuse her.

Holding Kayta's desperate gaze, Yuuri nodded solemnly. "We'll take care of him Katya, that was never the issue. It was our idea to begin with. As for not mentioning it to him, you won't have to worry about me letting it slip." Looking pointedly at Viktor, Yuuri arched a brow and waited for Viktor to echo the promise.

It wasn't until Yuuri had specifically looked to him that Viktor bobbed back into the discussion. He snapped his fingers with enthusiasm and spoke up, initially, as if he were boasting, "Lucky for you, I forget things all the time!" It wasn't until the words had a moment to sink in, and Viktor could see the discomfort on both Yuuri and Katya's faces, that he could tell he needed to specify. "The conversation. We never talked. What is this about? Pastila?"

As much as, seconds ago, Katya had felt like she was about to pass out from the tension, a wave of relief washed over her. She scrambled to take a step back, then another, and lowered herself into a sudden bow. It was deep, at a right angle, and clearly unpracticed, the way one might bow if they believed it was what they were supposed to do, but had only ever seen it on television in a language they didn't quite understand.

"Thank you, both. So, so much. I honestly, I never thought I'd see the day, but, even though it's night and all, I think, maybe, you really did find him." She raised up with a blink, only to pause and start scrambling to tuck her hair behind her ear in nervousness. "Oh. Sorry. Does that not make sense?"

Viktor, taking his cues from the advice before, put his hand on Katya's shoulder. "Don't worry, we understand, even if we didn't." He offered up a smile while he prodded her to stand upright. Then, once her posture was back intact, Viktor checked back on Yuuri, suddenly far more eager and alert. "Was that better?"

The rest of the evening had been brief, a slew of parting words and wishes for tomorrow. The car ride home was filled with mostly silence as Viktor drove and Yuuri tried to muddle through the slurry of all that had transpired over three long days.

Viktor had, on multiple instances, checked back in his brain for what might have troubled Yuuri so deeply. He asked, twice, if Yuuri was ready to talk about whatever had happened. Both times, Yuuri shook his head. While Yuuri could tell the ambiguity bothered Viktor, he wasn't convinced that he should tell Viktor his budding suspicions about Yuri's feelings. It was going to be hard enough just to get Yuri back into shape, choreograph a new routine and get him ready for his first qualifier without extra drama. Besides, it wasn't as if Yuri had done or told Yuuri anything more rude than usual.

The more he dwelled on the thought, the more Yuuri realized that keeping his mouth shut wasn't the answer, either. Even if it was inconsequential, or if Yuuri was being ridiculous to so much as consider the idea that Yuri saw him as something other than a rival and a punching bag, Yuuri didn't want to keep any kind of secret from Viktor, no matter how small. Still, Yuuri didn't utter a word. He fell asleep without explaining what was weighing on his mind, and hoped that Viktor wasn't too worried about him in the meanwhile.

He was.


End file.
